Testimony and Demeanor (3 page)

The first night on bivouac it was our platoon’s chore to post a sentry every two hours of the night. Demry drew two to four and Ellridge four to six—the last two watches. As we sat outside our tent smoking, Demry didn’t seem to mind either the cold or his assignment. From the ridge we could see the blinking light on top of the hospital, the tallest building in Fort Knox. It was seven miles away. We could hear the firing from the artillery range in between the gusts of wind, but we couldn’t see the flashes.

“There’s a shooting star,” he said.

“Maybe it was a flare,” I said. “Or an airplane landing.”

“No. It was a shooting star. I know shooting stars all right.” He lay back. “Just look at those stars. There must be thousands of them. Hundreds of miles away.”

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“To begin with, there’re not thousands of them but millions. More likely billions. And they’re not hundreds of miles away. Most of them are so far they have to be measured in light-years. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year.”

“Where’d they teach you that? At college?”

“No. I don’t know. I learned it here and there. Like the names of birds …”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Or the names of football teams.”

“You know all that too. That’s real good.”

I said nothing.

“You still didn’t tell me what’s the funny part,” he said.

I answered hastily, “Look—if I had asked, ‘Who’s Joe
Louis?’ or—or anyone. Elvis Presley. You would have found that funny.”

“Uh-huh. I bet you know all about Joe Louis, though. I don’t think I could tell you a thing about Joe Louis. We
all
know about Joe Louis.”

Again I said nothing, although I thought how unfair it was that each slip of my tongue should have been misinterpreted just enough to keep the chance to explain slightly beyond my reach. It also occurred to me that he was deliberately taking advantage of my inexperience in a worse way than I had unwittingly offended his.

We went to sleep without saying anything else. At two o’clock the sentry reached between the buttons on the front flaps and shook my foot. “McGlaughlin, you’re on,” he said, and left. I made a note of that. The sentry was supposed to wait until his relief was on his feet and clearly awake. But then, he might have been afraid of Demry. Or he might have waked me on purpose. I tried not to think that. Having only recently overcome my inability to see these people, I didn’t want to swing to the other extreme of paranoia.

I shook Demry’s shoulder. He sat up. I could hear his head scraping the top of the tent.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Two. You’re on guard duty.”

“Two o’clock in the morning?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Two o’clock in the morning.”

“That’s right.”

“Man, that’s my bedtime.” He lay down again.

“Someone’s got to be on guard.”

“I’ll just guard everything right here.”

“Come on, Demry,” I said, laughing.

“You go on and laugh,” he said. “I’m staying right here. It’s cold out there.”

“Someone’s got to be on guard duty.”

“You’re someone. You may have forgot that.”

“Look, Demry. You know as well as I do that the only way this whole thing can work is if everyone takes his turn. You have to have turns. That’s the only way discipline can be imposed and still be fair.”

He sat up again. “You’re very big on discipline, man. And you know why? It’s because you don’t really live here. You don’t live here at all. You get out of here and you go home. You know, home. That place where they send you magazines from. And those little cigars.
That’s
right—you got it—home. Where you live. But get this—I live here. I am here and you are not.” I could hear his rapid breathing as he paused. “So as long as I’m
here
, I’m not going to get sick or go crazy over your rules. You have it nice and easy, right? And if I sleep right alongside you a little of that is going to rub off. So we’re just going to skip walking around out there.…” He lay down. I didn’t say anything. “I’ll tell you,” he continued. “You may know a hell of a lot of things, but one thing you do
not
know is how to get
me
out
there
.”

I got out from under my blankets and knelt on top of them. I thought awhile. “Would you stand guard for me?” I asked.

He exhaled with his teeth closed. “I’m not going to talk all night, man.” He turned over. “O.K. I’ll tell you,” he said in a more moderate way. “If it was me, I’d roll over and not give a damn. If I was you, I’d say, ‘Demry baby, have yourself a good sleep!’ ”

“O.K.,” I said, and put my clothes on. “I’ll do it for you,” I said, and unbuttoned the flaps, crawled out with my rifle and boots, and pulled my field jacket with the chevrons on it through the hole behind me as though it were a soul leaving a body.

The stars were very bright. It really did look as though they might be not so far away—even as though it were the wind that
was fanning them into a fiercer glow. I wondered if Demry thought that stars were cold.

I walked in zigzags down the bare slope to the nearest pine trees and waited. It finally occurred to me that no matter what happened while I was in the Army, I would not really be changed—not the way I was by school or college. I was no longer being formed. All I could have from now on were sensations, which would be absorbed and digested by the way I already was. I cast my thoughts back to where my real life was going on. Where it was being considered, planned, felt. Where it was carefully creeping forward. When I would catch up with it. Way stations, rungs, nests, and resting places. Here I was a swallow flying through a long barn. A swallow among bats.

Yet I was still a little deranged. The pine trees were very clear to me. I went and touched them, their straight needles and their unknotted trunks, not as cold as I thought they would be, or as cold as I was.

I walked back up to the rows of tents. I didn’t hear the wind, I was so used to it. The startling noise was the coughing. From one tent at a time it came—no particular sequence to it, no set interval. As the time passed, it seemed to me I was tending one large beast that was making its noises into the night.

At ten past four I looked at my watch. I went to wake Ellridge. They had only three buttons on their front flaps. I unhooked the loop and pulled it up. The buttons came out of the worn holes. Ellridge was sitting in the back, his knees to his chest, his blanket pulled around his shoulders. He looked like a monkey crouched in an outside cage in wintertime. He hadn’t taken his boots off. How unfair it is, I thought, to add my order to the Army’s. They suffer enough. I was about to put the flap down again when Ellridge spoke. “I’m not asleep,” he said.

“O.K. On your feet.” I said it by instinct.

He came out with his blanket around his shoulders. “How come McGlaughlin isn’t on guard?”

“Look—I’m tired. It’s my bedtime. Enough of this chit-chat. Get your field jacket on and start walking around.”

“I thought you didn’t have to do any of this guard.”

He was exultant in a strange way, his eyes wide open and his mouth emitting little explosions—“ha! ah! oh!”—as though he had caught me doing something surprisingly daring and bad. He sucked in his breath, partly meaningfully and partly because he discovered how cold it was.

“You were covering up. You were covering up so he could stay wrapped up. That’s right. The middle of the night. Then you came to get me up so you can crawl back in there. So you can crawl back into your hole alongside that—I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it, but I’ll say it if you make me. If you make me stand out here with you crawling in there. But I will say it—oh, God, I will.”

“Ellridge, will you get your rifle and stop gibbering.”

“Oh, no. No, I won’t! I thought you was somebody pretty good, you know that? I thought you was all right. I thought you was something special, but Lord, you’re a sorry thing. You’re a nigger-lover! Nothing else at all. That’s all you do is just care for that nigger. That’s all you do is love him. Is love him and kiss him …”

“I can’t begin to tell you how stupid you are, Ellridge.”

He looked at the sky, as though he could see the wind in it. Then he tucked his nose under the edge of his blanket and began to cry.

“O.K., Ellridge. Get back inside.”

He stood there. I took him by the shoulders and turned him toward the tent. “Wait,” he said.

We waited until he stopped crying. Then he stooped down and crawled back into the tent. I pulled the loop of the flap down over the peg and left while he was doing up the buttons.

I wanted to go down to the pine trees again, but I stayed by the tents. I wasn’t tempted either to call Ellridge or to go into my tent and sleep. I couldn’t face either of them. I was tempted
to go lie down among the pine trees, but instead I tried to resist the wind. I tried to imagine that it was blowing right through me—so cleanly and so fast that it didn’t hurt. That worked for a while. Then I couldn’t keep imagining well enough, and I began to endure every minute, looking at my watch too often.

During the breaks the next day I had to lie down. I didn’t seem to be sweating very much, so I thought it would be all right. Each time I lay down I thought of how when we got back for the night I would gather blanketfuls of pine needles to put under me, and even around me.

We stayed out late. And even though I knew I would be warmer with the pine needles, I didn’t get them. I crawled into the tent and lay down. Demry went to sleep. I was about to fall asleep too when I felt a hand on my foot. I sat up expectantly, but no one said, “McGlaughlin, you’re on.” There was no one there. I lay awake alternately shivering and burning, trying to command my body to be calm. It is possible, but I couldn’t bring myself to the right pitch to do it.

First Sergeant Plisetsky noticed that I wasn’t myself the next day, and sent me on sick call. I was grateful. Everyone else was jealous. Demry thought I was lucky too. I had given in to so much by then that I even complained to him—explaining in a collapsed way that I had stood two watches.

“Well, you’ll get to make it all up now,” he said. There was something in his tone that I couldn’t decipher. I thought he still considered me lucky, although I hoped he meant it encouragingly. They didn’t take people into the infirmary with less than a hundred and one.

I got out of the hospital in only three days, but the company had already returned to the barracks, a day ahead of schedule. Shoemaker had been put in charge of the fourth platoon in my absence. He came up to me while I was sitting on my bunk cleaning my rifle. He had brand-new sergeant’s stripes sewn on his fatigues. The distinction is between field rank and acting rank. Acting rank you may sew on.

“Did you have a nice rest?” he said, simpering. “We missed you. Yes, all of the boys really missed you, Bonzo.”

“It was great,” I said. “The nurses all loved me.”

Demry laughed.

“Ooh, I don’t know what we can do about that,” Shoemaker said. “But I’ll tell all the boys to try real hard and see if they can’t just
like
you a whole lot.”

Demry laughed again. So did the other people sitting around. And, seeing all of them, so did Acting Sergeant Shoemaker. Sitting in my upper bunk, I felt as though I were in a canoe floating down a river of inane chortling noise. I picked up the separated stock of my rifle and began to make paddling motions. Pausing for a moment, I let the stock trail as though I were steering. “My God, Celia,” I said to Shoemaker. “Will these jungle noises never cease?”

Shoemaker stopped laughing, and gradually so did everyone else.”

“I don’t get you, Bonzo. You trying to be funny?”

“Yes,” I said. I was sick of the lot of them. While Shoemaker pondered his rejoinder, I added, “Did you have something specific for me to do or were you just wasting time?”

“O.K., O.K.,” he said. “Why don’t you go on down to the mess hall and make yourself useful. Tell the mess sergeant I sent you.”

It was a relief to get out of the barracks. I would gladly have volunteered for KP for the remaining eight days of basic. Among other things there was a feeling of grand accomplishment hovering about which I didn’t like. It was self-indulgent. And it was false—the whole training period had been pretty much of a disappointment, in fact. We hadn’t had any really stiff marches. There hadn’t been any bayonet drill. Target shooting was mildly pleasurable, but there had been no more than two weeks of that—not enough time for real improvement. For what they might have been worth by way of aesthetic incentive, the formal aspects of the military remained unelaborated.
Even the scenery was drab now that the illuminations of fall were over. A shoddy damp grayness penetrated everywhere, without the threat of a storm. All that was really happening here was time passing, steadily and unprofitably. But—and this was what excited them—certifiably.

Only eight days. And then fifteen days’ leave at home before I was reassigned to a more reasonable environment. I gladly peeled potatoes in a corner of the kitchen. With any kind of solitary chore I could make the time trickle more nimbly. In every spiral shaving I cut loose I saw artful progress, as though I were freeing my own spirit from the crust of living in that place. By the time I splashed the last potato in the vat I felt miles away and much more at peace.

Calm is most regularly induced to enter the physical world by a series of ornamentations; it doesn’t matter whether it is nature or oneself that executes them, so long as there is a stretch of repetitive exertion from a single source. Waves before the wind. The footfalls of a runner spinning the world beneath him. Paddle swirls in the wake of a canoe. Or curlicues of potato skin, as unbroken as the phrases sliding out from under the bowing hand of a cellist.

These repetitions are felt by our bodies, the deft, hardworking, and unsuspecting bundles in which we are enmeshed. Unsuspecting because it is by their efforts, the spasms of nerves and muscles that
we
command into rhythm, that they are calmed. And the calm rends them—plucks their fibers apart so that the spirit escapes to a dominant position. That is contentment, I suppose, and most people happen on it only by chance.