The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (6 page)

She blazed to her feet, but the cry that was meant for a woman's appeal came out, through her tightening lips, as the whine of a wife: “Can't they wait?”

“Whaddya—crazy?” He backed away, eyes round with righteousness. She would have to understand. If this was the way she acted before the wedding, how the hell was it going to be afterwards? “Have a heart, willya? Keep the fellas waitin' tonight? After all they done fa
me
?”

After a second or two, during which her face became less pretty than he had ever seen it before, she was able to smile. “Of course not, darling. You're right.”

He came forward again and gently brushed the tip of her chin with his fist, smiling, a husband reassured. “At's more like it,” he said. “So I'll see ya, Penn Station, nine o'clock tomorra. Right, Gracie? Only, before I go—” he winked and slapped his belly. “I'm fulla beer. Mind if I use ya terlet?”

When he came out of the bathroom she was waiting to say goodnight, standing with her arms folded across her chest, as if for warmth. Lovingly he hefted the new suitcase and joined her at the door. “Okay, then, baby,” he said, and kissed her. “Nine o'clock. Don't forget, now.”

She smiled tiredly and opened the door for him. “Don't worry, Ralph,” she said. “I'll be there.”

SERGEANT REECE WAS
a slim, quiet Tennessean who always managed to look neat in fatigues, and he wasn't exactly what we'd expected an infantry platoon sergeant to be. We learned soon enough that he was typical—almost a prototype—of the men who had drifted into the Regular Army in the thirties and stayed to form the cadres of the great wartime training centers, but at the time he surprised us. We were pretty naïve, and I think we'd all expected more of a Victor McLaglen—burly, roaring and tough, but lovable, in the Hollywood tradition. Reece was tough, all right, but he never roared and we didn't love him.

He alienated us on the first day by butchering our names. We were all from New York, and most of our names did require a little effort, but Reece made a great show of being defeated by them. His thin features puckered over the roster, his little mustache twitching at each unfamiliar syllable. “Dee—Dee Alice—” he stammered. “Dee Alice—”

“Here,” D'Allessandro said, and it went like that with almost every name. At one point, after he'd grappled with Schacht, Scoglio, and Sizscovicz, he came to Smith. “Hey, Smith,” he said, looking up with a slow, unengaging grin. “What the hell
yew
doin' heah ‘mong all these gorillas?” Nobody thought it was funny. At last he finished and tucked the clipboard under his arm. “All right,” he told us. “My name's Sahjint Reece and I'm your platoon sahjint. That means when I say do somethin', do it.” He gave us a long, appraising glare. “P'toon!” he snapped, making his diaphragm jump. “Tetch—
hut!”
And his tyranny began. By the end of that day and for many days thereafter we had him firmly fixed in our minds as, to use D'Allessandro's phrase, a dumb Rebel bastard.

I had better point out here that we were probably not very lovable either. We were all eighteen, a confused, platoon-sized bunch of city kids determined to be unenthusiastic about Basic Training. Apathy in boys of that age may be unusual—it is certainly unattractive—but this was 1944, the war was no longer new, and bitterness was the fashionable mood. To throw yourself into Army life with gusto only meant you were a kid who didn't know the score, and nobody wanted to be that. Secretly we may have yearned for battle, or at least for ribbons, but on the surface we were shameless little wise guys about everything. Trying to make us soldiers must have been a staggering job, and Reece bore the brunt of it.

But of course that side of the thing didn't occur to us, at first. All we knew was that he rode us hard and we hated his guts. We saw very little of our lieutenant, a plump collegiate youth who showed up periodically to insist that if we played ball with him, he would play ball with us, and even less of our company commander (I hardly remember what he looked like, except that he wore glasses). But Reece was always there, calm and contemptuous, never speaking except to give orders and never smiling except in cruelty. And we could tell by observing the other platoons that he was exceptionally strict; he had, for instance, his own method of rationing water.

It was summer, and the camp lay flat under the blistering Texas sun. A generous supply of salt tablets was all that kept us conscious until nightfall; our fatigues were always streaked white from the salt of our sweat and we were always thirsty, but the camp's supply of drinking water had to be transported from a spring many miles away, so there was a standing order to go easy on it. Most noncoms were thirsty enough themselves to construe the regulation loosely, but Reece took it to heart. “If yew men don't learn nothin' else about soldierin',” he would say, “you're gonna learn water discipline.” The water hung in Lister bags, fat canvas udders placed at intervals along the roads, and although it was warm and acrid with chemicals, the high point of every morning and every afternoon was the moment when we were authorized a break to fill our canteens with it. Most platoons would attack a Lister bag in a jostling wallowing rush, working its little steel teats until the bag hung limp and wrinkled, and a dark stain of waste lay spreading in the dust beneath it. Not us. Reece felt that half a canteenful at a time was enough for any man, and he would stand by the Lister bag in grim supervision, letting us at it in an orderly column of twos. When a man held his canteen too long under the bag, Reece would stop everything, pull the man out of line, and say, “Pour that out. All of it.”

“I'll be
goddamned
if I will!” D'Allessandro shot back at him one day, and we all stood fascinated, watching them glare at each other in the dazzling heat. D'Allessandro was a husky boy with fierce black eyes who had in a few weeks become our spokesman; I guess he was the only one brave enough to stage a scene like this. “Whaddya think I am,” he shouted, “a goddamn
camel,
like you?” We giggled.

Reece demanded silence from the rest of us, got it, and turned back to D'Allessandro, squinting and licking his dry lips. “All right,” he said quietly, “drink it. All of it. The resta yew men keep away from that bag, keep your hands off your canteens. I want y'all to watch this. Go on, drink it.”

D'Allessandro gave us a grin of nervous triumph and began to drink, pausing only to catch his breath with the water dribbling on his chest. “Drink it,” Reece would snap each time he stopped. It made us desperately thirsty to watch him, but we were beginning to get the idea. When the canteen was empty Reece told him to fill it up again. He did, still smiling but looking a little worried. “Now drink that,” Reece said. “Fast. Faster.” And when he was finished, gasping, with the empty canteen in his hand, Reece said, “Now get your helmet and rifle. See that barracks over there?” A white building shimmered in the distance, a couple of hundred yards away. “You're gonna proceed on the double to that barracks, go around it and come back on the double. Meantime your buddies're gonna be waitin' here; ain't none of 'em gonna get nothin' to drink till yew get back. All right, now, move.
Move.
On the
double
.”

In loyalty to D'Allessandro none of us laughed, but he did look absurd trotting heavily out across the drill field, his helmet wobbling. Before he reached the barracks we saw him stop, crouch, and vomit up the water. Then he staggered on, a tiny figure in the faraway dust, disappeared around the building, and finally emerged at the other side to begin the long trip back. At last he arrived and fell exhausted on the ground. “Now,” Reece said softly. “Had enough to drink?” Only then were the rest of us allowed to use the Lister bag, two at a time. When we were all through, Reece squatted nimbly and drew half a canteen for himself without spilling a drop.

That was the kind of thing he did, every day, and if anyone had suggested he was only doing his job, our response would have been a long and unanimous Bronx cheer.

I think our first brief easing of hostility toward him occurred quite early in the training cycle, one morning when one of the instructors, a strapping first lieutenant, was trying to teach us the bayonet. We felt pretty sure that in the big, modern kind of war for which we were bound we probably would not be called on to fight with bayonets (and that if we ever were it wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference whether we'd mastered the finer points of parry and thrust), and so our lassitude that morning was even purer than usual. We let the instructor talk to us, then got up and fumbled through the various positions he had outlined.

The other platoons looked as bad as we did, and faced with such dreary incompetence on a company scale the instructor rubbed his mouth. “No,” he said. “No, no, you men haven't got the idea at all. Fall back to your places and sit down. Sergeant Reece front and center, please.”

Reece had been sitting with the other platoon sergeants in their customary bored little circle, aloof from the lecture, but he rose promptly and came forward.

“Sergeant, I'd like you to show these people what a bayonet is all about,” the instructor said. And from the moment Reece hefted a bayoneted rifle in his hands we knew, grudgingly or not, that we were going to see something. It was the feeling you get at a ball game when a heavy hitter selects a bat. At the instructor's commands he whipped smartly into each of the positions, freezing into a slim statue while the officer crouched and weaved around him, talking, pointing out the distribution of his weight and the angles of his limbs, explaining that this was how it should be done. Then, to climax the performance, the instructor sent Reece alone through the bayonet course. He went through it fast, never off balance and never wasting a motion, smashing blocks of wood off their wooden shoulders with his rifle butt, driving his blade deep into a shuddering torso of bundled sticks and ripping it out to bear down on the next one. He looked good. It would be too much to say that he kindled our admiration, but there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well. The other platoons were clearly impressed, and although nobody in our platoon said anything, I think we were a little proud of him.

But the next period that day was close-order drill, at which the platoon sergeants had full command, and within half an hour Reece had nagged us into open resentment again. “What the hell's he think,” Schacht muttered in the ranks, “he's some kind of a big deal now, just because he's a hotshot with that stupid bayonet?” And the rest of us felt a vague shame that we had so nearly been taken in.

When we eventually did change our minds about him, it did not seem due, specifically, to any act of his, but to an experience that changed our minds about the Army in general, and about ourselves. This was the rifle range, the only part of our training we thoroughly enjoyed. After so many hours of drill and calisthenics, of droning lectures in the sun and training films run off in sweltering clapboard buildings, the prospect of actually going out and shooting held considerable promise, and when the time came it proved to be fun. There was a keen pleasure in sprawling prone on the embankment of the firing line with a rifle stock nestled at your cheek and the oily, gleaming clips of ammunition close at hand; in squinting out across a great expanse of earth at your target and waiting for the signal from a measured voice on the loudspeaker. “Ready on the right. Ready on the left. Ready on the firing line. . . . The flag is up. The flag is waving. The flag is down. Commence—
fire
!” There would be a blast of many rifles in your ears, a breathless moment as you squeezed the trigger, and a sharp jolt as you fired. Then you'd relax and watch the target slide down in the distance, controlled by unseen hands in the pit beneath it. When it reappeared a moment later a colored disk would be thrust up with it, waved and withdrawn, signaling your score. The man kneeling behind you with the scorecard would mutter, “Nice going” or “Tough,” and you'd squirm in the sand and take aim again. Like nothing else we had found in the Army, this was something to rouse a competitive instinct, and when it took the form of wanting our platoon to make a better showing than the others, it brought us as close to a genuine
esprit de corps
as anything could.

We spent a week or so on the range, leaving early every morning and staying all day, taking our noon meal from a field kitchen that was in itself a refreshing change from the mess hall. Another good feature—at first it seemed the best of all—was that the range gave us a respite from Sergeant Reece. He marched us out there and back, and he supervised the cleaning of our rifles in the barracks, but for the bulk of the day he turned us over to the range staff, an impersonal, kindly crowd, much less concerned with petty discipline than with marksmanship.

Still, Reece had ample opportunity to bully us in the hours when he was in charge, but after a few days on the range we found he was easing up. When we counted cadence on the road now, for instance, he no longer made us do it over and over, louder each time, until our dry throats burned from yelling, “HUT, WHO, REEP, HOE!” He would quit after one or two counts like the other platoon sergeants, and at first we didn't know what to make of it. “What's the deal?” we asked each other, baffled, and I guess the deal was simply that we'd begun to do it right the first time, loud enough and in perfect unison. We were marching well, and this was Reece's way of letting us know it.

The trip to the range was several miles, and a good share of it was through the part of camp where marching at attention was required—we were never given route step until after we'd cleared the last of the company streets and buildings. But with our new efficiency at marching we got so that we almost enjoyed it, and even responded with enthusiasm to Reece's marching chant. It had always been his habit, after making us count cadence, to go through one of those traditional singsong chants calling for traditional shouts of reply, and we'd always resented it before. But now the chant seemed uniquely stirring, an authentic piece of folklore from older armies and older wars, with roots deep in the life we were just beginning to understand. He would begin by expanding his ordinary nasal “Left . . . left . . . left” into a mournful little tune: “Oh yew
had
a good
home
and yew
left
—” to which we would answer, “RIGHT!” as our right feet fell. We would go through several variations on this theme: