The Lords of Discipline (32 page)

I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day. I had awaited the company party the way an azalea awaited the spring. I watched as Fox broke loose from his group and ambled over to the beer keg to replenish his beer.

I walked up behind him slowly, making no overt or hostile movement, moving easily as though I simply wanted another beer. Fox did not see me coming though I saw the other upperclassmen noting my approach. The fight would begin soon and we all felt its imminence in the air.

I put my cigarette out on Fox’s bare back. I ground it into his spine.

He screamed and turned. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, McLean?”

“Sorry, Fox,” I apologized. “I mistook you for an ashtray. Everyone makes mistakes.”

“I’m not going to forget this next year, maggot,” he said, his hand gingerly touching the wound on his back.

“Next year,” I said, “there ain’t gonna be enough of you left next year to feed a Venus fly trap.”

And I lowered my head and charged Fox, taking him down hard into the sand. I was punching as we hit the ground. Fox was kicking and grabbing at my hair. And the melee was on.

The two opposing groups charged at each other in a reckless, heedless assault, and there were no holds barred. There were fist fights and eye-gougings and ear-pullings. There were gang tackles, kicks to the groin, and hair-pullings. Four of them knocked me off Fox in the first furious charge. I found myself buried under a moving, grunting, angry pile of flesh.

I could not move. Maccabee and Wentworth had pinned my arms and someone was punching my stomach. I saw Pig and Mark working together, methodically cutting down anyone who moved within their range of operation. Tradd charged the group who had rendered me immobile and knocked off the guy who was hitting me in the stomach. It was Newman.

Newman took a swing at Tradd. It missed, but it was also a serious error of judgment. Pig and Mark both slammed into Newman from behind. Newman whirled, keeping his balance, and without looking threw a wild punch that landed on Mark’s nose. There was a sudden violent flurry of punches and Newman was on his knees, the blood dripping from his face, slowly discoloring the sand.

The brawl lasted an hour. It was exhausting and enervating and deliciously pleasurable. I fought with every single person I despised and I licked most of them. I felt powerful and liberated on that beach. Pig, Mark, Tradd, and I began fighting as a team, moving from fracas to fracas, as the combatants spread out across the beach. We poured beer over Maccabees head, stole Blasingame’s bathing suit, and watched his naked behind sprint toward the cover of the sand dunes. Maccabee counterattacked with his classmates, spread-eagled me in the sand, and poured beer over my head and face until Pig could break through their line of defense. I had a wonderful time.

Then I saw Fox sitting astride Jim Massengale near the oceans edge. I broke loose and was in a full sprint when I hit the miserable son of a bitch. I was on him before he got up. Every freshman in the class had challenged him and he could barely lift his arms to ward me off. I dragged him by the foot to the water’s edge. When we reached the surf up to my knees, I dropped down and held his head under water. At intervals, I let him up to breathe. The space between the intervals grew longer and it gave me immense and furious pleasure to see his mouth open in a terrified quest for oxygen. He was desperate and afraid beneath me, and his body began to kick and flounder in panic. I heard a shout from the beach, and eight of Fox’s classmates ran toward us. Pig threw a body block that felled two of them. Mark tackled one of them from behind, but the others knocked me off Fox and began dunking me under the water. They did it playfully. None of them realized 1 had been planning to murder Fox in the Atlantic Ocean.

The fighting grew sporadic and passionless. Upperclassmen and freshmen were walking arm in arm down the beach and singing songs up by the beer keg. Boys were shaking hands all over the beach. Maccabee put his arm around my neck and kissed me drunkenly on the cheek.

“I’m going to pour you a beer, Will,” he said, “if I’ve got the fucking strength, which I doubt.”

Frank Maccabee was drawing me a beer when Fox tapped me on the shoulder.

“I’m going to buy you a beer later on, Will. It’s time that we recognized each other. My name is Gardiner and you gave me some licking today,” he said, extending his hand in a gesture of reconciliation and the burying of hatchets.

I smiled, took his hand, and said very sweetly, “Don’t you ever call me Will again, you cocksucker.”

I shook his hand firmly with my right hand and hit him in the mouth with a punch I had readied since September. His teeth broke through his lower lip. The second punch caught him in the cheekbone. I went down with a shot to the left temple delivered by Quigley who was standing on my blind side. Mark crumpled Quigley with a punch to the back of his head and the afternoon had turned ugly again.

On the ground Fox looked up at me and said, “I’m going to run you out on demerits next year, McLean. Me and my classmates are going to get you out by first semester. I promise you that.”

“Hey, Fox,” I said, rubbing my temple as I got another beer. “I know how the system works now. You try to run me out of school and I’m going to take a little stroll over to the Bear’s office and tell him that you’re married. We’ll leave hand in hand.”

“You can’t do that, Will,” Maccabee said.

“Oh, I won’t, Frank.” I smiled. “Unless I have to. And I’m sure I won’t. I’m absolutely positive I won’t.”

And I threw my beer into Fox’s face as I left to join my classmates.

The freshmen built a fire on that beach and we sat around it telling stories about our plebe year. Already it was becoming history and even beginning to assume the fantastic shapes and distortions of mythology. It was memory now and memory was different for each one of us. I listened as Pig described how the four of us had gone down to Fox’s room and beaten him senseless beneath the blanket at three o’clock in the morning. I listened as Alexander told how he couldn’t wait for the new class of freshmen to arrive so he could make their lives as miserable as ours had been. Jim Massengale described Hell Night, and all of us laughed until we were rolling in the sand. Tradd imitated Maccabee delivering the speech on Hell Night.

I grabbed a bottle of bourbon from Murray Seivers and filled my paper cup with it.

“Easy, tiger,” Mark warned. “Some things don’t mix.”

I
left the fire and walked out to where the waves were breaking over my feet. I took a drink of the bourbon and stared out toward the ocean and remembered a chemistry class from first semester. The professor had given me an unknown chemical during a lab and told me to perform a series of set experiments to discover the identity of the chemical. Instead, I began to pour chemicals at random into the test tube the professor had set before me. The mixture changed colors twice and the changes were radical, extraordinary. Then I added another chemical, which was not marked, which itself was an unknown, though it was a colorless liquid without any volatile characteristics of its own. But when I began putting this liquid into the test tube drop by drop, I had created something terrible and violent. Smoke poured from the tube and the mixture began to spurt volcanically and crawl over the lip of the tube and spill onto the marble desk. The teacher ran up to me and with a long clamp angrily poured my creation down the drain and flunked me on that day’s lab assignment. I remembered that moment often and wondered what mystery or metaphor of chemistry I had stumbled upon, what fierce, accidental power I had unleashed. As I stood on the beach with the noise of my classmates behind me, I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and. it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange, magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?

Mark was right, I said to myself, drinking the bourbon. Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

Before I walked back to my friends and classmates, before I returned to the fires as an upperclassman, as a sophomore, I made a vow to myself, a vow to the guerrilla in the hills, a vow to the poet who was about to enter the confused and dazzling city of memory.

I said this to myself and I meant it:

I will not be like them. I will not be like them.

I shall bear witness against them.

Part III

THE WEARING OF THE RING

S
EPTEMBER
1966—J
ANUARY
1967

Chapter Twenty-two

I
t did not rain during the month of September. The trees of the city took on a desperate, haunted look; the bitter sunlight of Charleston tortured the groves and drained the secret gardens, and the city itself seemed to resonate with a silent vegetable terror during that long dry season. Outside the barracks windows, the leaves when wind-blown crackled like thousands of errant wasps colliding in midair. The scorched lawn of autumn took on a look of savage thirst, and even the parade ground, that most tended and pampered of meadows, had an undermined greenness about it. The automatic sprinklers worked through the day and almost never ceased working through the night. The drought seemed an appropriate symbol for how I felt after the suicide of Poteete. Or perhaps I only noticed weather then, when my spirit was dry and brittle, and like the land itself was in terrible need of storm and change and deliverance.

I was famous among my roommates for my mercurial mood-swings. But they accepted my melancholy as some distorted mirror image of my overwrought flights of euphoria. Among themselves, they whispered that it had something to do with being Irish. Even the laughter of Irishmen was sad, they said, shrugging their shoulders as though they had invoked some immutable law of nature. I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.

I lost something in that month but I gained a lot more. There was a general slowdown; it was a time of patience, of hard yet productive reflection, and a vast torpor that ate away at the part of me that was excessive, cynical, life-affirming, and curious to a fault.

Annie Kate liked me much better during this period when my guard was down. So did Tradd. Both of them found in my vulnerability an essential softness I lacked when my heels were clicking against the pavement just right and every word I uttered was a joke or the beginning of a joke. That was it. I had quit joking completely; the lines of endless banter ceased when there was nothing funny to say, nothing at all. I pretended to study during these long periods of self-exile, these joyless voyages to the interior, but it was study that could not come from books. I would sit at my desk, my eyes sightlessly focused on a text, and let my mind drift over the words like a cork taken by a current. I would not hear anything going on in the room around me. I would not hear Pig lifting weights or Tradd ordering supplies for R Company on the company phone or Mark humming Italian lullabies as he obsessively prepared his desk for his studies. I would not hear the sound of the bugles or companies marching to drill or Mark turning the radio to WTMA. I did not even hear the lion roaring at night in the Hampton Park Zoo or the whistle of the 11:42 train, the Lowcountry Zephyr, speeding across the trestle on the river at the exact same time that it had every single night I had been on campus. It was the sound of the lion and the train that I missed the most.

But when you are thinking and thinking deeply, familiar sounds go unheard and only startling or unfamiliar sounds can break you out of your thoughts. I had listened for that train and that lion every night after taps since my plebe year and I had found comfort in their regularity. They were often the last sounds I heard before I fell asleep and they would register in my subconscious.

It was a requirement of the plebe system that each freshman must piss on the lion before the beginning of the sophomore year. The lion had been pissed on so often by drunk cadets that he no longer moved or protested when boys unzipped their flies and approached his cage. He was old and humiliated and smelled strongly of human urine. Only at night was there some dignity and sense of dread to his roar.