The Lords of Discipline (69 page)

I saw the train hurtling across the trestle and I heard the screams of the cab driver. I saw my roommate marching resolutely toward the train, dazed, in the same resigned, unequivocal walk that had carried him through the regiment. The drums had not stopped for him nor would they ever stop. His walk was stiffly military, unbearably proud; it was not faltering or hesitant. He had gone as far as he would go. He had done all the things he would do. He had lived all the life he wanted to live. He needed one last moment of pride and honor. He was taking his powerful body toward the train. That body, which we all feared, had fears of its own and could not face a father’s hurt eyes, a mother’s disappointment, or the canceled wedding trip of a black-haired girl. He feared a life where friends could not speak his name. He could not think of the deeper hurt and it was not in him to think of it. As always, he was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart. We had turned our backs on him, but now he was walking to a place where there would be no turning away, no loss of contact, no refusal to acknowledge or touch. He would make a last insane connection. The train would not turn for him. There would be no about-faces.

“No!” I screamed while the terrible squeal of the brakes cut through the night air as the engineer spotted the boy on the tracks.

He turned toward me and smiled. I swear he smiled and said a single word I could not hear because of the noise of the brakes.

But I knew the word.

“Paisan,” he said, and turned to meet the train.

T
hat night the Corps learned something about a different, harsher code of honor. They found him in sections and pieces along the marsh that bordered the trestle. Those few of us who saw his body after his death still become horrified when we try to describe what the train did to him. What the train undid.

I turned away from him for a second time. I turned away and vomited, but kept walking, putting distance between me and the trestle and the marsh. People were running past me now, cadets shouting, “My God,” behind me. I heard the Bear ordering everyone back to the barracks, and felt a numbness overcome me and I could not speak or cry or think. I just knew that 1 needed to put distance between myself and that torn, lifeless thing I had loved for four years. As I walked and as I heard the noise and tumult and confusion behind me, I understood for the first time why the punishment for Lot’s wife was so severe. There were times when it was unforgivable to look back.

It was an hour later when I returned to the barracks. I do not remember where I went during that hour. The OG in fourth battalion unlocked the gate and let me pass without reporting me. I climbed the dark silent steps to the fourth division. The light in our room was on and Mark and Tradd were waiting up for me. We looked at each other but there was nothing to say.

I did not tell Tradd and Mark what I had seen by the tracks. They had already heard and asked no questions. In the mirror I saw my face. It was the face of a boy who had seen too much. Getting into bed, I began listening to the voice inside me. At first, I didn’t think it was my voice. It sounded so warlike, so vengeful, so invincible. It sounded cold and evil, but it was a comfort to me in the following days when I would not leave my bed, when I only wanted to listen to the voice. “I will get them,” the voice said. “I will get them.”

Chapter Forty-two

F
or three days after the death of Dante Pignetti, I lay in my bed. Mark and Tradd thought I was mourning Pig’s loss but that was not it. I was studying what special gifts I could bring to the subject of vengeance. I was biding my time and waiting for the cold black fury to pass over me.

For three days I slept over eighteen hours a day, gathering my strength and dreaming of The Ten. I tried to interpret the nature of their secret agenda against us. They had moved against cadets before and had always succeeded in their mission. Their table of organization included the President and the Commandant of the Institute. But I had knowledge of them; I would watch how they operated against the enemies who had broken their membrane of secrecy.

On the bed I was a lone, absurd figure in the history of my times, a sleeper in the century of ruthless law, of bombers over suburbs, of artillery barrages destroying the gaily painted walls of kindergartens. In my bed, I dreamed of military science classes, imaginary troop movements, and the portraits of boys slain in Vietnam hanging from the library walls. In these dreams I satisfied my own sick and overextended need to be my own greatest hero. I had a passion for the undefiled virtuous stand and a need to sacrifice myself for some immaculate cause. I knew this and hated myself for it and could do nothing about it. Ah, Annie Kate, I will marry you and adopt your child because I’m so good. Ah, Bo Maybank, of course I’ll be your friend and accept your soft towels because I’m so kind. Ah, Tom Pearce, of course I will ease your journey through the plebe system because I am so saintly. Ah, Pig, of course I will defend you before the honor court even though you have been dishonorable because I am so noble. Who else would I take as prisoners of my high sanctity before my life was over?

I tried to think of Pig during this time but it was hard. I can seldom judge how I feel about an important event in my life as it happens. There is always a time lapse before I am sure exactly what it is I feel. I did know that my refusal to rise from my bed upset my roommates and alarmed my classmates in R Company. They thought it was my finer sensibilities and my greater love of Pig that put me in the bed, that separated me from the rest of them. I secretly enjoyed my honorary role as chief mourner. They thought well of me because I was not like them, because I was unable to carry on and incapable of blocking the horror of that suicide on the tracks.

“Too sensitive,” they would whisper as they conferred with each other in the alcove. They did not know I was Pig’s avenger and cadre-man, not his chief mourner. I would open my eyes and smile at my friends, then return to the business of sleeping. I kept my hatred secret behind that smile as I always did. The smile was the weapon to keep your eyes on. I should have warned my friends never to turn their backs on my smile. But I was not talking in those days; I was looking for something. In daydreams, I saw myself cut down by firing squads in sun-bleached courtyards as I screamed out the word
Libertad
to the small tyrant who watched from the palace window. I threw myself on hand grenades, and charged into the machine-gun fire aimed by impregnable gunners. But I was not looking for that so I slept some more and could not move very well in those days or participate in the life of the campus, which continued undisturbed as it always had and always would. Nothing could still the coming of reveille, the gathering of platoons, or the striking of flags at retreat.

But I did not get in trouble with the Commandant’s Department during this period, and it was one of those times I loved the Corps of Cadets with all my heart. For the Corps conspired to protect me, to give me time for collecting myself, for surrendering myself up to whatever force took up residence within when my roommate died. There were times when the Corps could be a powerful protector of its own members, and if ever its love was turned on you for any reason, you were always surprised and ennobled by the heat and fire and passion of it. During those days, the Corps reminded me that I was one of them and that I had paid my dues to the Line. They fed me, protected me from the eyes of the OC, from the gaze of observant teachers, from the interrogations of the officers, from delinquency reports, white slips, demerits, or formation reports. The Corps kept the Institute at bay until I was ready to rejoin it. And word had gotten around the Line that something smelled about the way Dante Pignetti had been run out of school. It was not a rumor, but more a feeling, vague and ethereal, which settled into the collective consciousness of the Corps. The feeling ran so strong that it took the form of a joke.

At first I was shocked when I saw Pig’s death becoming a subject for cadet humor. An unknown author had scratched this line into the paint above the urinal on fourth division:
Dante Pignetti was railroaded out of the Institute.
Since, all cadets were honor-bound never to speak Pig’s name aloud, his death became a natural subject for the school’s graffiti writers. Angry, I took my belt buckle and scratched out Pig’s name. But I thought more about it and what I knew about cadet psychology and how they dealt with tragedy. They had laughed at Pig’s death. That was the only way the Corps could deal with it or anything like it. There was a fierce and undeniable health in their response. And beneath the humor, on a much deeper level, was the sentiment that something was imbalanced and unanswered and unjust in the death on the tracks. The Corps was wondering what it was that had driven Pig to such a horrible death.

The Ten bided their time and the days passed without incident. I got better and stronger. I waited for them to move again. But this time would be different, I told myself. This time I would do everything I had to do.

I had discovered a power unknown to me and I would use it.

The Ten could match my strategies, but not my fury.

Chapter Forty-three

I
had attended military science classes for four years, and frontal assaults obsessed me. When I read military history, the romance and desperation of charges attracted my attention and respect. Marines and their sons were comfortable only with fierce, contested landings on beachheads and the subsequent inland drive, moving in a straight undeviating line and killing everything that threatened to halt their advance. This was a legacy from my father. I would rather confront and be confronted directly. I wanted to see the swift charge of my enemy as he made his perilous approach to my zone of fire. My nature did not respond as well to envelopment movements, to the stealth of an enemy who trusted in more complicated operations. I did not want to hear the twigs break in the forest behind me or quail flush before the platoon advancing on their bellies to my rear. But frontal assaults lacked subtlety and grace. That was not how The Ten would come for me and Mark Santoro.

It was on Friday in the second week of May, with the hot damp weather stealing into the lowcountry, that Mark entered the room after evening mess and said, “Well now, at least, we know how they’re going to fuck us.”

“What are you talking about, Mark?”

“Have you seen the latest demerit list?” said Mark.

“No.”

“Well, I suggest you take a good look at it,” he said. “Your name takes up a full page. Mine takes up a little more than a page.”

“How many demerits did I get?” I asked.

“Not many,” Mark answered. “Only thirty-two. Thirty-two big ones, baby. Ol’ Mark came in at thirty-five. They’ve torn our room apart on four occasions in the last four days when we were in class and burned us for everything from improperly folded socks to fart stains on our underwear. At least they’re not going after Tradd. That’s probably because his family founded America and then decided to buy South Carolina.”

“They can’t do that, Mark,” I said. “They can’t get away with giving seniors that many demerits. Everyone will know they’re after us.”

“They seem to be getting away with it to me,” he said. “They shipped three seniors last year for excess demerits and five the year before. It’s not that unusual.”

Tradd entered the room and said in a worried voice, “Did y’all see the DL?”

“See it?” Mark replied. “I
was
the fucking DL. Me and Mr. Sensitive here.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Tradd asked.

“Who gave us the demerits?” I said, ignoring Tradd’s question because I had no immediate answer. “Who were the reporting officers?”

“There were four different ones,” Mark said. “Asshole Butler. Asshole Wentworth. Asshole Davis. And flaming asshole Allison.”

“All Institute grads,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Bingo, Mr. Einstein,” Mark said, pacing the room. “They’re going to run us out of here on excess demerits. They’re going to kick us out of here a couple of days before graduation. I bet those motherfuckers time it perfectly. I bet they hit us with our last demerits right before the General hands us our diplomas.”

“How many demerits do you have so far this year, Will?” Tradd asked, going to his desk and tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook.

“Before this DL I had forty-five,” I said.

Tradd figured quickly and said, “You now have seventy-seven demerits for the year, Will. Since a senior is allowed a hundred, you have only twenty-three to go before you’re out.”

“I had twenty-three for the year when I woke up this morning and shaved my pretty face,” Mark said. “Now I’ve got fifty-eight big pimples on my shiny Italian ass with plenty of time to plant forty-two more.”

“We’ve got to think,” I said.

“Think about what, Will?” Mark said. “There’s nothing to think about except getting ready for Saturday-morning inspection tomorrow. I’m going to look like the Hope Diamond when Mudge inspects me and I’m going to get every knob in R Company up here to get this room ready for inspection. I’m going to blitz down my dick and dare Mudge to give me a single demerit. And this room is going to look like Betty Crocker’s kitchen.”

“That won’t do any good, Mark,” I said. “They’ll get us even if I look good as God and you look like my son. So this is how they’re going to do it.”

“You’ve got to resign,” Tradd said seriously. “That is your only chance to get out of this with any dignity.”

“I’m graduating with my class, Tradd,” Mark said with startling fervor. “I’ve sweated blood with this class and I’m walking out of this dump with them.”

“That’s how I feel about it, too, Tradd,” I said. “Only if I go, I’m going to make The Ten a household word across this state.”

“That’s foolishness,” Tradd said. “That’s just nonsense and foolishness. You must act sensibly and do what you have to do. Threats can’t help you now, Will. Now you’ve got to salvage what you can.”