The Lords of Discipline (26 page)

When all else failed, they turned his classmates against him, the plebes who were his brothers and protectors under the system. They encouraged us to show contempt for him, to abandon him. They rewarded us for betraying him.

And it was easy to hate him in those first months. I needed someone whom I could visibly and openly hate, so I joined my classmates in vilifying Bobby Bentley and soon the freshmen despised him as much as the upperclassmen did. We hated him for his weakness, his frailty, his stained pants, and the smell that was always on him. He was unclean and he wore the odor of urine like some debased cologne. Often they would not let him change his pants for days. His stench belied the silence or anonymity of his approach. In a line of plebes, you could always smell the presence of Bobby Bentley.

So the freshmen began refusing to give him shirt tucks or help him get ready for parade. We neglected to tell him of meetings with the cadre or the time of required formations. When we left the campus for general leave on Saturday night, we left him behind in the barracks. We assumed the roles of his torturers, his tamers, and heaped all our repressed fury at the cadre on him. We abandoned Bobby Bentley because we saw ourselves in his affliction and did not like to be reminded that he was one of us, that he, too, represented our class, our virility, our sad, abused history. In a school where your only solace comes from the support and friendship of your classmates, the solitude of Bobby Bentley became awe-inspiring, mythic, and unbearable. At first we thought we had created an island, an unclean one, an untouchable; but that was not true. We had become a cadre in reserve, a platoon of Iscariots. My classmates and I, with our zealous endorsement of the cadre’s contempt for Bentley, had indeed helped create something unseen in the class of 1967.

We had created the first man in our class.

On a rainy night in October, they lined up all his classmates facing him. There were thirty-eight of us who had survived through the first month. They ordered us to spit in the face of Bobby Bentley. We all did it; all thirty-seven of us. When it was my turn, his face was covered with spit and his eyes were tightly closed. I spat. I spat into his face and went back to the end of the line.

By the middle of October the cadre was getting desperate. They ordered all the plebes to talk individually with Bentley. The Taming had failed. They wanted us to talk some sense into his head, to tell him that he was hurting the image of our class, that his presence was bringing the additional wrath of the cadre on all our heads. Ten of my classmates had preceded me before I entered his room on the third division to encourage him to quit the Institute. He was writing a letter home when I entered his room. Looking up, he smiled at me and asked me to sit down.

“Where’s your roommate, Bobby?” I asked. There was a strong stench of urine in the room. He noticed that I noticed it.

“I haven’t had a roommate since plebe week. No one wants to room with a guy who pisses in his pants,” he answered. “They won’t let me send my uniforms to the laundry anymore. Except for the two I wear to class.”

“They told me to talk to you, Bobby.”

“I know, Will.”

“Why don’t you just get the hell out of here, Bobby? I mean, you’re just causing trouble for the rest of us. They’re starting to give sweat parties in your name, man. And it’s perfectly obvious you don’t belong here. Three-year-old kids don’t do what you do, Bobby. You ought to have more pride than to stick around wetting your pants in front of them.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I really am. But I just can’t help it, Will. It’s embarrassing. I feel terrible about it. The doctors say it’s nerves. Nerves. Every night I tell myself that tomorrow will be different, that I won’t do it tomorrow. But every day’s the same. I’m as disgusted with myself as the cadre is. I don’t blame you or them for wanting me out.”

“Then why don’t you go?”

“Because it’s my choice to stay. It’s not yours and it’s not theirs.”

“You don’t belong here, Bobby.”

“My daddy paid his money just like everybody else’s daddy.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“The other freshmen scream at me when they come up to talk to me, Will. At least most of them do. They come up to my room and treat me like they were the first sergeant. They call me pussy and dumbhead. Alexander even slapped me when I told him I was staying. But they don’t know what it’s like to be me. I don’t blame them, you see. I’d do the same thing and say the same thing if I were them. I just can’t help my nerves. It’s just so embarrassing. I get this feeling in my stomach every time I hear the bugle blow at reveille. I know it’s going to start again. I keep telling myself to take it one day at a time, not to let them get me down, that I can take anything for nine months. I need to prove to myself that I’m as tough as they are. Do you understand that, Will?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here, Will?”

“Because I’m an asshole. And I’m sorry I came up here to bother you, Bobby. I would never have done something like this last year. I wasn’t like this last year. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“Does your roommate St. Croix want me to leave?”

“No, I don’t think so, Bobby. He’s afraid that if you leave, they’ll start concentrating on him.”

Bobby Bentley laughed, and I realized that I had never seen him laugh before, never seen most of my classmates laugh or even smile. I left that room feeling an excruciating shame for having willingly embraced my role as an inquisitor representing the cadre. I vowed that from that night on I was not going to be one of Bobby Bentley’s problems. I certainly had enough of my own.

Three days later the entire freshman class of R Company met in the first division alcove room to discuss the problem of Bobby Bentley. It was the first official meeting we were allowed to conduct without the supervision of the cadre. It was our first moment of institutional democracy and the first time I had seen many of the faces of my classmates relaxed and unbraced.

John Alexander, by far the sharpest knob militarily, conducted the meeting with brisk efficiency. In the very first month, he had emerged as the natural leader of our class, and the cadre was already saying that he was excellent material for regimental commander. He began the meeting with a voice indicating a high seriousness of purpose: “At ease, men. We all know why we’re here tonight. I’ve talked with several members of the cadre and they want us to help figure a way to run Bentley out of the Corps. He’s hurting the image of our class and specifically he’s hurting the image of R Company. Now I know all of us are in agreement that we want to prove that the class of 1967 is the best class ever to come through the Institute. In order to prove that, men, we just can’t have a freshman peeing in his damn pants like a baby every time he comes to formation. I have a suggestion and I’d like to run it by you. I suggest we go up to his room right after this meeting. We go up there as a class and tell him that we voted unanimously that he’s not worthy to be in our class. Then let’s pack his bags and escort him bodily to the front gate. If he tries to resist, then we might have to become a little physical.”

“Good, idea, John,” a voice rang out.

“All right,” three others agreed.

“Are there any objections?” Alexander asked.

I tried to speak, but I remained silent. In silence, I had long ago decided, was my deliverance. I wanted to walk through the plebe year unnoticed, drawing no controversy, and making no enemies. I had seen what the cadre did to plebes who made themselves too visible. The freshmen in that room were working themselves up into a mob. We were about to break out of the room when a voice objected.

“I object.”

We turned toward the voice, and I got my first view of Mark Santoro, sitting in a chair beside the window. Behind me stood the musclebound freshman I had heard some of my classmates call “Pig.” They were the only two Yankees left among the freshmen in R Company.

Mark slowly turned around in his chair, pointed a large finger at John Alexander, and said, motioning fiercely, “Get off the desk, motherfucker. I get nervous when people try to tell me things standing on that desk.”

It was the first time I had noticed that Alexander was addressing us while standing on the same desk on which Maccabee had delivered his Hell Night speech.

“What’s eating you, Santoro?” Alexander said, though some of the command had gone out of his voice.

“You’re eating me, you Southern chicken shit. You and the rest of these king cocks from below the Mason-Dixon line.”

Rising to his feet, Mark folded his arms as Pig moved around to his side to demonstrate his support of what his roommate was about to say.

“Pig and I have talked it over. We think Bobby Bentley has more guts than any other knob in this company.”

“He’s a waste, Santoro,” Alexander said.

“When did you make corporal, Alexander?” Mark sneered. “When did you become a member of the cadre? How come you appointed yourself the guy who shits all over one of his classmates?”

“I’ve been talking to Mr. Maccabee and Mr. Blasingame about the problem of Bentley. I don’t know why they chose to talk to me, but I think they felt like I knew what the rest of you guys were thinking. I’m only trying to help this class as a whole. They’re giving the R Company knobs a chance to exercise a little leadership. They’re leaving this to us. We’ve got a chance to earn their respect.”

“It’s their job to run freshmen out of school,” Mark said. “It’s our job to protect our classmates.”

“He doesn’t belong in this school,” Jim Massengale said.

“He makes our class look like shit,” Webb Stockton agreed.

“We’ve got to get rid of the Gerber baby.”

“If we don’t get his ass out of here, they’ll take it out on us.”

I said nothing but got up from the floor and motioned to Tradd. We started to walk out of the room.

“Where are you going, fellow?” Alexander asked sharply. It was a measure of my success at anonymity that Alexander, that most ambitious of freshmen, did not know my name.

“To my room,” I said.

“The meeting’s not over,” Alexander said.

“It is for me.”

“For me, too,” Tradd said. “That boy’s got enough problems without having to worry about his classmates. We’ve done enough to him already, and I think this meeting is ludicrous.”

“You do, eh, St. Croix?” Alexander said. “Well, some people think you don’t belong in this school any more than Bentley does. We ought to run both of you out of here tonight.”

“Alexander, tell me something,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“I’d like a piece of information from you. And you’re the only person in this room who can give it.”

“Well, hurry up and ask it,” he said, looking at his watch. “We’ve got to decide what to do before taps.”

“The question is this: Is it very hard to breathe when you have your nose stuck up the first sergeant’s asshole?”

Tradd and I walked out with the laughter cascading behind us as the meeting broke up.

There were some significant results of that evening: Bentley would not be run out by his own classmates; a friendship began among Mark and Pig and me; and I had made my first open enemy in John Alexander.

After the meeting of the freshmen, the fury of the cadre rose against Bobby Bentley almost daily. And the laughter of the other upperclassmen grew more shrill and derisive as they came from the other three battalions to witness the frenzied efforts of the R Company cadre to run him out of the Corps. It grew deadly serious and assumed dimensions of insensate cruelty that broke the bounds of the plebe system as we had known it until that time.

Yet as the pressure on Bentley became more agonizing and grotesque, something also began to happen to the attitude of the R Company freshmen in general. In our collective unconscious, by slow accretions of awareness, we grew proud that Bobby Bentley was taking everything they could dish out, everything imaginable. They were beating him with their fists and standing on his spine as he did pushups. They flogged his ass with brooms and swords until it bled. They would not let him eat or sleep. Each night he would pass out in the shower room after they had their way with him. Often there were five or ten upperclassmen concentrating all their perverted energies on Bobby Bentley while the others took care of the rest of us.

An awareness was born among his classmates in those weeks that he was one of us, that Bobby Bentley, our classmate, was a gentle guy, much too gentle for the Institute, that he was showing a quality of courage beyond the strongest of us, and that in his own quiet, determined way, he may just have been the toughest freshman ever to walk through the Gates of Legrand. We began to be ashamed of ourselves for how we had treated him and to talk openly of our admiration for him. Soon he had become a symbol to all of us. He was braver than any of us. He was the best of us. He had endured over thirty days of the Taming, and it was the cadre who was showing signs of breaking.

The beauty of the plebe system, the one awesome virtue of that corrupt rite of passage, was made manifest as we began to gather around him and protect him. The brotherhood was taking effect. When they called for Bobby Bentley it was as though they were calling to all of us, and our commitment to him deepened as we witnessed his debasement and his loneliness.

He made it past the Thanksgiving break. And the Taming went on. In December they called him out of the rack line, separating him as they always did from the main body of plebes to illustrate the extent of his abnormality. We watched as Bobby left our line and followed Fox and Newman into the shadows of the stairwell. But this night when they called for Bentley, Mark left the line without permission and followed right behind him, followed by Pig, by Tradd, by John Kinnell, by Webb Stockton, by Jim Massengale, by me, by all of us. And when they told him to hit the cement and pump out fifty pushups, all thirty-eight of us hit the cement simultaneously. The cadre went berserk. They quelled that small inconsequential revolt with ease as they dispersed us into smaller groups, shivering along the gallery. But it was our first indication of the strength, the formidable, irrefutable strength that comes from solidarity.