The Lords of Discipline (31 page)

“You should always wear shoes when you go to the latrine,” Mark said. “You can never tell when there might be a broken coke bottle on the gallery.”

One voice began chanting, “Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Toilet paper.”

“Watch out for this glass.”

“The water’s hot as hell.”

We left our beds and crept to the door, looking out on the gallery. Sitting astride the four garbage cans on fourth division were four R Company upperclassmen with expressions of consummate suffering on their faces. We saw Newman walking back to his room, naked except for his flip-flops. He was carrying his rifle by its sling. As he passed the room, we saw a large circle of polish on his buttocks. He was limping as though he was in great pain. He got halfway to his room, then, due to some urgent message delivered by nature, sprinted back to the latrine.

Blasingame, who had been asleep when we had come into the barracks, came up the stairs from third division with a quizzical, obdurate look on his face. Amazed, he studied the upperclassmen sitting naked on the garbage cans, as motionless as statuary.

“Boys,” he called out. “Boys. Boys. What’s happening to Big R? All my boys are shitting in cans. Goddam, boys. Use the latrines. Jesus Christ, all my boys are shitting in cans.”

Pig had stuffed a towel in his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. I ran back to my rack and muffled my laughter in my pillow. Tradd and Mark were rolling on the floor. Tears were streaming down Mark’s face.

When we could finally speak, Tradd said, “Do you think they’ll have a sweat party tonight? How long will it take them before they figure it out?”

“They’ll have to finish their business before they can figure it out,” Pig said. “And, paisan, they’re gonna be too weak to think about giving any sweat parties. Some of them will be on the commode for the rest of the night.”

The sweat party the next day was the longest and toughest of the year, but we laughed our way through it. They knew and we knew that we were a scant two weeks away from being upperclassmen. We had made it.

Chapter Twenty-one

T
hen it was June week, with tanned cadets walking by the storefronts of King Street in their white summer uniforms and the parents and relatives of seniors filling up all the hotels in the city and the suburbs. We had a full-dress parade each day and checked for our final grades taped on classroom doors in the academic buildings. Tradd surprised everyone and won the Star of the East medal as best-drilled cadet, in competition beneath the bright sweltering sun with cadets from every other company. Mark, Pig, and I cheered for him from the reviewing stand as Abigail and Commerce watched their son nervously sitting under an umbrella with General and Mrs. Durrell. When he was announced the winner, every member of R Company swarmed onto the field and carried him on their shoulders back to the barracks. By winning the Star of the East, R Company had accumulated enough points to remain honor company for another year, and Maccabee received the Commandant’s Cup from the General at parade the following day. Tradd had his picture taken with the General and Abigail and Commerce, and it appeared on the first page of the B section in the Charleston
News and Courier
on Wednesday of June week. He was the first Charleston boy to win the medal in twenty years, and as he said, smiling at his father, the first St. Croix to win it in history.

The rank sheets came out announcing the corporals among my classmates for the next year. Tradd, Mark, and Pig would be corporals and I would be a private, the highest military rank I would ever attain. I had been ranked in the bottom five of my class. The only reason I was not ranked lower was because Pig had rated me number one on his rank sheet. “Because of that poem, paisan,” he exclaimed. “Because you’ve got hair on your ass.” It was a ranking that I appreciated but which very few others understood.

The basketball team had a cookout at General Durrell’s plantation house north of Charleston. Reuben Clapsaddle and I were the only survivors of the plebe system among the freshmen. Lancey Hemphill was named the most valuable player and Wig Bowman was named team captain for the next year by Coach Byrum. It had been another long, losing season for the varsity, and most of the team ate their steaks quickly and escaped the melancholy accusatory eyes of our coach. The General delivered a rather grumpy speech on the invaluable lessons to be derived from losing. Mrs. Durrell poured lemonade and apologized for not having attended a single game. She was every inch the General’s wife and moved with the taut, tensile grace common to high-born Southern women.

Pig’s girl friend, Theresa, flew down from New York and stayed for the entire week at the Francis Marion Hotel. She was a shy, frail-boned girl with long, shining hair like a blackbird’s wing. She was as delicate as Pig was not, and it was obvious that they loved each other very much. It was good to be around them, and I studied how people were required to act when they were in love so I would know the forms and nuances of that sweet delirium if and when it happened to me. Pig let me dance with her at the graduation hop. I was the only other boy she had ever danced with since she met Pig when she was fourteen.

“Don’t get too close, paisan,” he warned gently. “He’s like a brother to me, Theresa, but I can’t let him get too close.”

I did not get too close. I had never danced a slow dance with a girl without touching her, but I did with Theresa as Mark and Tradd laughed at me from their table.

I attended that hop with the sister of my squad sergeant, Quigley. Her name was Susan and I didn’t like her very much. She was a fine girl, but her face was suggestive of a variety of memories, all of them bad and all of them permanent. Her face was her brother’s face and as I danced with her, her mouth reminded me of his mouth, her eyes became his eyes, and her breath was her brother’s, not her own. She could not help who her brother was and neither could I. But a Quigley with breasts was still a Quigley. In the backwaters of consciousness I looked upon her as linked in secret, obscene ways to the cadre, a soft breeder of cadremen and plebe systems. Her brother had not been the worst, but he had been one of them. I had licked and kissed his shoes during my Taming and could not bring myself to kiss his sister no matter how many times she pressed against me or how many times she turned her face toward mine as we walked along the Battery after the hop.

Every day after parade, Mark, Tradd, and I went fishing for sea bass with Commerce in the tidal rivers around Kiowah and Seabrook Island. On Tuesday, I was badly sunburned and Abigail rubbed vinegar on my back and shoulders when we returned. She cooked the fish in a white wine and cream sauce after we had cleaned them on the back porch. We had drinks on the verandah after dinner, and Commerce told long stories of spearfishing in the Virgin Islands and fishing for piranha on the Amazon River. Abigail and I would swing on the porch swing, Mark would sit on the banister, and Tradd and Commerce would rock in the white wicker chairs as Commerce recounted in exact detail his memories of lost voyages away from Charleston. We drank our gin and tonics slowly and listened to the insects in the gardens and Commerce’s voice as it navigated the seas of the world.

In our room after taps, the four of us began lying awake and telling each other the stories of our lives. We spoke of our fears and ambitions, our insecurities and disappointments. We were no longer in class, no longer exhausted by the plebe system, and for the first time we began to share the intimacies that come with long, leisurely hours of reminiscence. We vowed that our brotherhood, our four-sided union, would be sacred and eternal, and that ours was a friendship that would be stronger and more inviolate even than our allegiance to our class.

On the night before we were recognized, Pig took a pocket knife and we cut the veins of our wrists. We mingled our blood and made those awkward vows of friendship that, with boys, always come easier in symbolic sentimental gestures than in language. Our room shimmered in those last sweltering days with the joy of companionship.

“Now we’re like Indians,” Pig said, pressing a handkerchief to his wrist. “Now we’re like fucking Indians, and we’ll hunt buffalo together for the rest of our lives, paisans. For the rest of our lives.”

Tradd told us that he had never had three close friends in his whole life, that he had always found it difficult and painful to make friends. He thanked us again and again in darkness when we could not see his face. Haltingly and movingly, he thanked us every night of our last memorable week as knobs.

On Thursday before graduation, the freshmen were bracing loosely on the quadrangle during noon formation. For weeks there had been little malice or threat on the faces of the upperclassmen, and we no longer feared the barracks. Final exams had milked the last drops of venom from the plebe system.

But on this day, they came at us again. They were swarming for a last time, screaming, pounding our chests, making us hit the quadrangle for pushups, forcing us to run in place, shouting the old familiar obscenities in our ears. For a half-hour, we sweated and recited plebe knowledge on the quadrangle until Blasingame issued an order to halt.

I rose up sweating, and Maccabee was in front of me.

“At ease, dumbhead,” he said. “Let your chin out.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“I’m not a ‘sir’ anymore. My name’s Frank,” he said, smiling and extending his hand.

I shook his hand and said, “My name is Will, Frank.”

“You and I are going over to Gene’s Lounge tonight, Will. You and I are going to do some serious drinking.”

“Sure, Mr. Maccabee, I mean, Frank,” I said. “Sure. I’d like that.”

And I tell you that at that moment, they had me. I almost wept. I don’t know to this day if it was gratitude or relief or pride, but I know that they had me, and I almost broke down and cried in front of Frank Maccabee.

Soon upperclassmen began coming up, smiling at me, slapping me on the back, and calling me by my name for the first time. I learned the importance of naming that day, how a name can change your perception of both yourself and the universe.

“Hello, George. My name’s Will.”

“Hello, Larry. Will.”

“Hello, Dan. Call me Will.”

“Hello, D. J. My first name is Will.”

Blasingame walked up to me and recited, laughing, “ ‘The dreams of youth are pleasant dreams of women, whiskey, and the sea.’ You gauldy knob, my name’s Philip.”

“Hi, Philip,” I said, shaking his hand. “My name’s Will.”

Then Fox came up to me.

He was not smiling and his approach still intimidated me. He looked at me, sneering insolently with his cruel mouth. He knew he walked among freshmen who despised him with only the gift of his first name to offer.

“My name’s Gardiner, dumbhead,” he said, extending his hand to me.

I did not take his hand. I slapped it away.

Then I looked into his narrow eyes and said coldly, “My name’s Mr. McLean to you, Fox. And it’s going to be Mr. McLean for your whole life.”

“It was just the system, McLean, you little baby,” he said angrily. “It wasn’t anything personal. It was just the system and I was just doing my job.”

“Let’s just say I don’t like your system and I didn’t like the way you did your job.”

“You just remember that I’ll be a senior next year, you little shoe-licker. I’ll jack it up your ass every time there’s a room inspection. I’ll get my classmates to shit on you so many times, you won’t know what hit you. We’ll run you out of here on excess demerits in a month.”

“I’ll see you at the company party, Fox,” I answered. “If you have the guts to show, which I seriously doubt.”

“I’ll beat the living shit out of you, McLean,” he said loudly.

“There’s going to be twenty-eight guys to beat, Fox.”

“I’ll see you on the beach, McLean. What a pussy! I should have run you out the first week of school.”

“You’re going to wish you did when I’m sitting on top of that ugly nose of yours.”

“Rack your goddam chin in, dumbhead,” he ordered. “If you won’t let me recognize you, then you’re still a knob to me. Rack that beady chin in, scumbag.”

“Go fuck yourself, Fox.”

T
he genius of the Institute lay in its complete mastery of all rites of passage, both great and small. They set aside one day at the very end of the year for all the companies to throw a beer party on the beach for a day of swimming and drinking, when the freshmen could challenge the upperclassmen to fights, thus allowing them to expend any unresolved frustrations and antagonisms of the year. Usually, these were good-natured wrestling matches in the sand, the freshmen testing their new-won manhood against the cadre who had conducted that severe nine-month test. It marked the first time the two groups fraternized together under official sanction. It was the first public occasion when the freshmen gathered together as first-class citizens of the realm, with all their rights intact and all their papers in order.

R Company assembled on the north end of the Isle of Palms. A keg of beer was set up between the beach and the stunted, wind-tortured vegetation that grew on the low sand dunes near the road.

The plebes huddled together in their bathing suits, drinking the cold beer and appraising the much larger group of upperclassmen. I looked at my classmates with admiration. Our bodies were hard and tempered. We could do pushups all night long and there was a healthy, vigorous glow to our group, an essential vitality as we prepared ourselves for the fracas. Twenty-eight had survived the long march of the plebe year. Thirty-two of our classmates had dropped out along the way and we, the survivors, considered them our inferiors. We had filled out in a year, but we still carried aggrieved mementoes of the journey. We whispered to each other as we began making our choices for when we would rush the upperclassmen.

Not that the upperclassmen were worried by our aggressive presence. They were veterans of company parties and their strategies. They had nothing to fear from us. There were more of them. They were older and stronger and more wily. But we had the bitter residue of humiliation and anger on our side. And I had my eye on Fox as he hung back in a crowd of classmates.