The Lords of Discipline (35 page)

“Who was this girl, Bubba? This poor woman so hard up she had to take you on as a boy friend?”

“It was your daughter, sir.”

The roar of the Bear was difficult to describe adequately. Cadets often compared it to howitzers at parade, to Phantom jets exceeding the sound barrier, to the lion in the park. Some insisted that it matched all three simultaneously. But the howl he let loose in that room exceeded anything that I had ever heard issue from a human throat. I left my feet when he screamed.

“Bum! I got the best-looking daughter you’ve ever seen in your life and if you want to get crucified without nails or burn in hell before the Creator calls you or if you want me to set your eyeballs on fire with this cigar, then let me hear you say another single word about my daughter.”

“I’ve been trying to teach Mr. McLean respect for women all evening, sir,” Pig said triumphantly.

“Colonel,” I whispered, “I didn’t know you had a daughter. I would never have said that.”

“She wouldn’t be caught living or dead with a miserable excuse for a man like you, bum. But let me give you a couple of demerits to remind you of my daughter’s honor the next time I come into this room.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” I said. “Demerits only tend to make me forgetful.”

“I’ve found that demerits have the opposite effect, Mr. McLean. I’ve found that they stimulate the memories of my lambs,” he said, handing me a white slip.

“Colonel, don’t you think the little epigram on these white slips is the silliest misuse of the English language you’ve ever heard? ‘Discipline is training which makes punishment unnecessary’ That symbolizes the whole logic of the Institute to me.”

“Then transfer to Clemson, lamb. I’ll pack your bags, drive you to the bus station, and kiss you on the lips good-bye. I happen to agree with that motto. Your parents pay good money to have me watch out for you and to remind you when you displease the Bear. Demerits are part of your education, lamb, like textbooks or grades or slide rules. The more demerits I give you, the more benefits you derive from an Institute education, the more returns your parents have on their original investment. Demerits are probably the only thing that reminds you this is a military school, Mr. McLean.”

“Amen,” Tradd said.

When I had completed filling out the white slip, I surreptitiously removed Pearce’s note from my pocket, folded it twice, and handed it with the white slip to the Bear. He placed them beneath his clipboard and as a farewell gesture blew a giant plume of cigar smoke in my face. The smoke could have eliminated a colony of termites. The Bear could have gotten a job with Orkin.

“Colonel, I like talking to you except when I have to breathe.”

The Bear grinned his brown-toothed grin and said, “Thanks for the white slip, Bubba. Ninety-eight more demerits and I get to ship you to Clemson before you’re allowed to disgrace the ring.”

“Major Mudge gave me five demerits at the first Saturday morning inspection, sir,” I said. “But I know you’re too good-hearted to run a senior out for excess demerits.”

“I’d do it with pleasure,” he said. “I ran three out in May last year. Good lambs, too. But slobs, like you. I told them that I had no hard feelings toward them. I was just performing my duty and they were caught not performing theirs.”

“Colonel, before you go. I want to apologize again for your daughter. But I would like to know one thing. Does your daughter take after you or your wife?”

“My wife, Bubba. Why?” he asked, glowering.

“The Lord is good after all,” I said.

He laughed, looked around the room, and before he departed, said, “Two Italians, an Old Charlestonian, and a sloppy shanty Irishman from Georgia. You ought to set up a branch of the United Nations in this room. As you were, gentlemen, and good night.”

T
en minutes before taps, Tradd and I walked down the gallery to take a shower. We were alone in the shower room. The battalion was slowing up and the cadets shuffled along the galleries like tired cells in an artery. There was always a slight tension in the neurotic anticipation of taps.

Tradd spoke through water as he washed shampoo from his short-cropped hair.

“Mother would like you to come over for dinner after the football game on Saturday. You can spend the night if you can get the Bear to give you a weekend leave.”

“I can’t this Saturday, Tradd,” I answered. “I’ve got something else I have to do.” I let the hot stinging spray flow over my eyes and face. For three years I had gone to Tradd’s house every single weekend simply because I had no other place to go. Suddenly I found myself invited to Annie Kate’s house almost every weekend, and there was the growing, exhilarating, and unmentionable involvement with her.

“Mother will be disappointed,” he said. “What are you doing, Will, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Don’t tell Pig and Mark about this, but I’ve met a girl I really like.”

“You!” Tradd said, genuinely surprised. “Does she like you too?”

“Not that much,” I confessed.

“Is she a local girl? I may know her,” he said.

“No,” I lied. “She’s from way off. Some nonexistent place like North Dakota. Her father’s in the Navy.”

“When will I get to meet her?”

“Not for a while, Tradd. She’s very shy about meeting people. I can’t tell you everything now, but I will someday, I promise. And you’ll be the first one to meet her.”

“Why don’t you want Pig and Mark to know? They’ve been wanting you to have a girl friend for a long time.”

“For about the same amount of time as they’ve wanted you to have a girl friend” I laughed. “I just don’t want to get teased by them, Tradd. I’ve never been able to take teasing about girls.”

“I’ve never had to,” Tradd said, smiling to himself.

“I feel so awkward around girls. I never seem to think of the right thing to say. I can’t seem to make them feel comfortable, and I always think they wish they were with someone else. They make me feel terminally shy, Tradd. Even ugly. I think I’m so aware of my face and how I look and how I appear to them that I can’t even really see them or talk to them. How do you feel around girls, Tradd? I mean really. What goes on in your head when you’re around a girl you really like?”

“I feel threatened, Will,” he said seriously. “I feel like I’m about to be invaded, smothered completely. I’m rarely comfortable around them. But that’s not surprising. I’m rarely comfortable around anybody.”

“Except me,” I corrected.

“Except you,” he agreed.

“What about Mark and Pig?” I asked. “Why aren’t you comfortable around them?”

“It’s different with them, Will, and it’s a difference hard to explain. I have great affection for them, and I know they feel the same about me. But the only time it really works for us is when all four of us are together. They’re my friends and roommates only because of you. I didn’t earn their friendship on my own. I think they would do anything for me. I’ve never met people with such a strong sense of loyalty and we’ve shared so much together. But we’re such different types and it’s such a strange accident that all of us are together. Still, it’s a happy accident and I’m glad we all found each other.”

“A great accident,” I said.

“Especially for the honey prince,” he said bitterly.

“Forget that shit, Tradd. The Corps has this nasty way of pinning damaging nicknames on people.”

“It hurts only because it strikes so close to home, Will. One of the reasons I came to the Institute was because certain people, including my father, have always considered me effeminate. I thought if I survived the plebe system, it would quell all doubts about my masculinity. No one feared the plebe system as much as I did. I wasn’t like you, Will. I knew all about the brutality and the excesses and I knew the cadre would despise me from the moment I walked into the Gates of Legrand. But I needed to prove to myself that I could take everything they could dish out. I loved it when I heard that football players quit because they couldn’t take the system. I couldn’t help it, Will. I loved it. I thought since I stayed when stronger boys left I would no longer have to put up with taunts about my voice or my manner. But that’s not how it works at all. Not in the Corps of Cadets. It’s a good nickname for me, Will. It’s perfect. That’s why I hate it so much. You’ve no idea how much a perfect nickname can hurt. I can’t walk anywhere on campus without hearing it. Even if no one says it, I can still hear it.”

Taps sounded through the barracks with all the old infinite sadness of finality. All cadets were one day closer to being whole men.

We dried ourselves quickly and returned down the gallery to our alcove room in time for the all-in check. Mark and Pig were already in their racks and the lights were out. Tradd dressed in his modest striped pajamas while I fell into the bottom bunk in my shorts, my uniform crumpled in a heap beside my desk.

I loved this time of day best. It was my favorite time anywhere. I liked the approach of sleep as much as I liked sleep itself. The sheets were clean and the windows were open and the cicadas screamed in the dry oak branches outside the windows. The odor of the marsh was so urgent and strong, so evocative of the Atlantic and infinite fertility, that the breeze that lifted the sheets from my body smelled of trout and shad and mullet and flowed in a secret renegade creek through our room. Far off in that city of light and water the bells of St. Michael’s tolled high over Broad Street, freighters moved through dark water, and the nightwalkers began their solitary and uncontested rule of the brick alleys. Tradd shifted in his bed above me. Lightning flashed in the distance and the earth began to think of rain.

“Hey, Will,” Mark asked, “did you finish your paper for Edward the Great’s class?”

“Not yet,” I answered, turning toward the voice in the darkness. “I’m going to the library in the morning.”

“How can you guys stand to look at that fat blivet?” Pig asked, rising up on one elbow. “He weighs three hundred pounds if he weighs an inch. His body is disgusting. He doesn’t even need to go on a diet, man. He needs an operation to sew up his esophagus for about three months.”

“He’s a great teacher, Pig,” Mark countered. “The best I’ve ever had.”

“I’m not saying he’s not, paisan. I’m just saying I couldn’t sit and look at that body all day without getting sick to my stomach.”

“Maybe he has glandular problems, Piglet,” Tradd said. “Some fat people can’t help being fat.”

“That’s what they all say,” Pig explained. “Every fat blivet I’ve ever met told me he had bad glands. Not one of them ever told me about stuffing too much chow into their fat blivet faces. Reynolds ought to do himself a favor and take a vacation to some country having a famine.”

Then Mark changed the subject suddenly by asking, “Will, did you ever get laid this summer?”

“No,” I answered, rolling over to go to sleep and hoping that the gesture would end the conversation.

“Did you try?” Mark insisted.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m in a perpetual state of trying. I came close, though. One girl let me walk her home after a movie, and we shook hands at the front door.”

“Why can’t you score, Will?” Pig asked. “You’d think you were an amputee or a homo, with the luck you have with women. Hell, there are broads with wide-ons all over the place waiting for a guy like you to come along.”

“I got laid so many times this summer that I thought I was the only white man in South Philly,” Mark boasted.

“You
are
the only white man in South Philly,” Pig giggled.

Tradd’s voice came from above me after a moment of silence. “Why didn’t you ask me if I made love to a woman this summer, Mark?” Tradd said.

“You don’t even look at women, Tradd,” Mark explained. “Much less get laid by them.”

“I met a girl this summer. I even made love to her. At least twice,” he declared with stiff formality. “It happened when I was traveling in England.”

Pig and Mark screamed simultaneously, and I heard their bare feet hit the floor as they made their way through the darkness to Tradd’s rack. They began slapping his shoulders roughly and tickling his sides until he was breathless with laughter.

“You ol stud horse,” Mark said. “You’ve been keeping secrets from your roomies. Out there getting it and not saying anything.”

“It’s those quiet ones you can’t trust. My daughters are always gonna date guys with the biggest mouths in Brooklyn. If they’re talking then they can’t be fucking,” Pig crowed.

“Who was it, Tradd?” I said, rising up on the other side of the rack. “And was it human?”

“It’s no one’s personal beeswax except my own. And the young lady’s in question, of course,” Tradd said demurely, but it was obvious that he had never been the central figure in any discussion of sexual prowess and was enjoying the experience in his own baffled manner.

“Was she a nice girl?” I asked.

“She was a wonderful person,” he replied. “But not really my type.”

“How many times did you say you blew her socks off?” Pig asked, his tongue tracing his upper lip.

“Did she scream and claw your back and beg for the banana?” Mark asked.

“As you can see, Tradd,” I said, “sex is a sacrament to our Italian roommates.”

“It has Extreme Unction beat all to hell,” Mark said.

“I want to hear about every disgusting, stinky detail,” Pig said in a tone that eloquently expressed all the wildness and animalism of sex.

“I’m surprised at you, Pig,” Tradd scolded. “You are forever thrashing innocent boys who come in this room and even look at Theresa in an untoward way, yet you insult my friend and my relationship with her by asking me to describe our acts of love together. I find your behavior very inconsistent.”

“Hey, you’re right, paisan. I’m sorry. I just didn’t think,” Pig said apologetically.

“I’m the last virgin left in the room,” I groaned. “Hell, I’m probably the last one left in the world.”

“You won’t ever have any more pimples,” Pig said with authority. “Pimples can’t survive regular sex.”

“I have regular sex,” I said, “only I have it with myself.”

“Oh, gross,” Tradd said. “I’m sorry I brought up this repulsive subject.”