The Lords of Discipline (51 page)

I would lose Bo after that night, as I would lose Jimmy Mance, Coach Byrum, Johnny, Doug, and Reuben. I would lose basketball and the fine camaraderie of athletics. But it was Bo I would miss the most, the little boy-child with his useless, lonely set shot and his towels fresh and warm from the dryers. His mother would call me three years later, grieving and proud, to tell me about the death of her son, the helicopter pilot, Lieutenant Bo Maybank. How can I say how splendid it must have been for him to come winged and ominous from the heights, dwarfing the tall men who had once teased him and stuffed him struggling and outraged into towel carts full of soiled laundry? How can I tell you that Bo never learned that height is not always the important thing? But he had learned all that he would ever need to learn about other small men with good eyes, good hands, instinctive cunning, and set shots far deadlier than his. A small man shot Bo Maybank out of the skies of Vietnam. The bullet entered his eye and blew out the back of his head.

His mother wept and I wept. I cried all night for that smallest of men who had loved me with his towels, who loved the game but never scored a single point or took a single shot except in empty gyms after the crowds had gone home. I remembered his tiny leaps up toward me after the VMI game and I regretted I had not looked down from the shoulders of my roommates, from the accolades of the crowd, looked down and done the right thing for once in my life, the grand and perfect gesture. I should have lifted Bo Maybank up with me, and together we should have taken that last frantic ride to the locker room. But I didn’t; I wanted it all, all for myself.

W
hen I finished dressing that evening, I walked out to the center court and stood, silent, in the middle of the gymnasium floor. I was one of the last to dress and the Armory was massive and lonely. I saw a basketball beneath the bench that Bo had not seen when he collected the equipment after the game. My footsteps echoed through the gym as I walked over to retrieve it. I dribbled the ball to the top of the key. I could measure my life in the number of jump shots and layups I had aimed at the steel rims of baskets. I had played the game because I felt ugly as a kid and painfully shy. People sought me out in my guise as an athlete. I did not have confidence they would seek me out or like me if I faced them nakedly, without the aura of my sport to recommend me. To masquerade my fear and insecurity I had found a sport to hide behind, and now I would have to perfect other disguises and join other masquerades. My time in gymnasiums was finished.

In the darkness of a gymnasium lit only by a winter moon, I shot a jump shot that hit the rim and bounced back toward me. I did not retrieve it. It bounced past the half-court line, the bounces getting smaller until the ball began rolling. I watched it roll past the other foul line, slowly now, until it crossed the out-of-bounds line and stopped. Out of bounds and out of my life. Like most other ballplayers I had a superstition. I could never leave the gym until I had made my last shot. But not tonight. I turned and began walking out of the gym. I had missed the shot and somewhere along the line, I had missed the point. But it was over now. I had gone to my limits as an athlete and I knew the secrets all athletes knew. I walked out of the gymnasium and never once did it occur to me to look back. I was free.

B
ut as I passed through the dark corridor behind the stands, a voice called out to me from beneath the bleachers. I was startled and turned toward the voice, both angry and afraid.

“Mr. McLean,” the voice said desperately, “I’ve got to see you, sir.”

It was Pearce. I looked back toward the locker room and saw Doug Cumming saying good night to Bo.

“You scared the living shit out of me, Pearce,” I said.

“I need your help, sir,” he answered. “Could you come down to the yacht basin and talk to me? There’s no one around there at this time of night. We can talk alone.”

“Go on down there, Pearce. I’ll walk around first battalion and cut across the baseball field.”

He departed silently and I walked out the front door.

The boats of the marina were silvery with moonlight. Pearce’s face was black and silver. He was handsome and frightened, and the moon highlighted his face like a coin recovered from pitch.

As I approached him, I realized I did not know this somber boy at all. In a real sense, you could never know a freshman at the Institute, no matter how resolutely you tried to remove the social barriers that separated you. A plebe could never fully trust an upperclassman, could not afford to relax his guard around anyone except his classmates, who shared his station and his exile. Pearce tensed as I neared him. When I called his name, he came to attention and braced.

“This isn’t a sweat party, Pearce,” I said. “I didn’t come down here to rack ass. At ease.”

Not until I said, “At ease,” did he quit bracing. I was a senior and he was a freshman, and only the passage of time could free us from the recognition of our enmity. And there was a part of me that liked it very much, that Pearce snapped to attention when I entered his field of vision. I needed the silent ritualistic acknowledgment of my superiority.

Also, with Pearce, there was something atavistically Southern at work between us. I wanted his gratitude for my being a white Southerner who had changed. I wanted to be his deliverer, and I expected the same measure of servility from him that I demanded from all the other humans who were the victims of my deliverance. From his eyes I could tell that Pearce recognized the subtlety and tenuousness of both our connection and our enmity. Among the masts and with the hulls of boats reflecting in the waters of the incoming tide, we faced each other uncertainly, as allies, but most inimically and essentially, as white boy and nigger.

His eyes were dark and troubled as they moved past me toward the huge, illuminated silhouettes of the barracks, toward the baseball field, toward the Armory. He was looking to see if I’d been followed.

“Do you want to go water skiing, Pearce?” I said, glancing at my watch.

“Pardon me, sir?” he responded, puzzled and still looking over my shoulder.

“Why else did you call me down to the marina?” I asked. “Every time I see you I feel like I’m working for the CIA and you’re going to pass me top secret plans for the destruction of Miami.”

“You haven’t been answering my notes, Mr. McLean,” he said, and his tone was accusatory and angry.

“What?”

“I’ve left you four notes and you haven’t answered a single one. You haven’t tried to contact me.”

“That’s bullshit, dumbhead. I check that book every single day, and there hasn’t been one communication from you in months. Are you sure you haven’t been putting the notes in the wrong book?”

“
Decline of the West.
Between pages three hundred eight and nine, sir.” There was irony in the way he emphasized the word
sir.

“Pearce,” I said, “has anyone seen you put those notes in there?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Then I wonder if anyone has seen me check the book,” I thought aloud, “or seen my roommates check it when the team’s been on the road. Hell, Pearce, I’ve done it so much and it’s such a habit, I don’t even look to see if anyone’s watching me anymore.”

“The four notes I left you have all been removed from the book, sir,” Pearce said. “I thought you had taken them but just didn’t care to do anything about them. But someone has taken them, and someone obviously knows how I contact you.”

“What did you say in the notes?” I asked, as I looked back over my shoulder, back toward the lights of the barracks.

“Mr. McLean, last week at retreat formation, someone came up behind me and said I had two weeks to leave the Institute of my own accord. He said if I didn’t leave I’d get special treatment far worse than anything I had gotten until now. He said I would go on a long ride I’d never forget.”

“Who was it, Pearce?” I asked. “If you knew who was talking to you then maybe I could find out what’s going on.”

“He came up from behind me, Mr. McLean,” Pearce explained. “I’m on the quadrangle and I’m a knob and I’m bracing my ass off, sir. It’s dark and I’m not allowed to move a muscle. Suddenly there’s this strange mean voice telling me to get my black nigger ass out of this school or I’m going to take a ride in two weeks.”

“There’s no place they can take you without being seen or heard.”

“Maybe they’ll take me off campus,” he said. “Once they get me out of those gates, America is a mighty big place, Mr. McLean.”

“Don’t piss me off, dumbhead,” I said, irritated at his scornful tone. “I was just wondering how they’d get you off campus. They can’t just tool through the front gates unless they have permission. They can’t just drive right by the guard and the Officer in Charge. And they can’t just take the only black smackhead in the history of the school without everybody on campus knowing it.”

Then I remembered something, and it hit me with a blazing force and clarity. I was no longer standing with Pearce beneath the shadows of boats. Suddenly I was high in the air, dizzy with fear and the vision of the quadrangle far below me, and I was listening again to the crazed, unbalanced voice of a fat boy who would be dead in eight hours, hanged by his own belt. Poteete’s voice roared out in my memory. He came to me now furious, wronged, and vengeful.

“Wait. I know where they’ll take you, Pearce,” I said.

“Where, sir?” he answered. “How do you know?”

“They’ll take you to the ‘house,’ ” I said, and my mind shimmered with this bright and singular connection to the past.

“What house?”

“I don’t know, Pearce. I honestly don’t know. But I’m positive that’s where they’ll take you, and I promise you one other thing.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“If they get you to the house, they’ll run you out of this school,” I said, and we stared at each other.

“There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, sir,” Pearce said. “Before this voice left me at retreat formation, he put his finger on my back. He made a mark on my back. He drew something with his finger.”

“What did he draw, Pearce?”

“The number ten, sir.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I don’t understand any of this, Pearce. Every time I think The Ten is a figment of the collective imagination of the Corps and the alumni, something happens to make me feel they’re as real and actual as the Gates of Legrand. Just when I think that you and the Bear are paranoid, these small events occur and I think we’re being watched and studied by people who anticipate our every move. Then I start to wonder if I’m paranoid.”

“Sir, someone is taking the notes from the book. We know that for sure. And someone came to talk to me at retreat formation. And someone drew a ten on my back.”

“Why have they waited so long to make their move? Why haven’t they tried to get you out of here before now?” I asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” he replied coldly. “I’m not a member of their organization.”

“Don’t be a wiseass, Pearce. I was just starting to like you.”

“I’m scared, Mr. McLean,” he said. “I’ve been scared ever since that guy came and talked to me. He sounded mean.”

“I’m scared for you,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder and walking him to the floating dock, where we sat and stared out into the dark waters that surged toward us from the Ashley River. The tide lifted and moved the dock gently beneath us.

“But we might both be scared for nothing. This could be some elaborate prank someone is playing on both of us. Nothing has really happened that’s bad or sinister. It’s just that we’re talking like something has to happen, like we’re waiting for a storm that doesn’t even exist.”

“It exists, sir,” he said. “I can feel it happening all around me and now I’m sure it’s going to happen. I thought you weren’t answering my notes, that you just didn’t give a shit. But I thought you were at least receiving them, Mr. McLean. That means someone intercepted them before you got there. That means someone knows everything between us.”

“How’s your roommate, Pearce?” I asked.

“A nice guy,” he responded. “From Connecticut or New Jersey or one of those New England states up there. It’s all just north to me. But Chuck’s been great this year, and he takes a lot because he rooms with me. They make him wear white gloves at mess because he rooms with a nigger and they don’t want him to get nigger germs on their food.”

“Nice world, the planet Earth, eh, Pearce?” I said, taking off my shoes and socks. “Have you ever seen a basketball player’s feet? We’ve got the ugliest feet in the world. Blood blisters, peeling flesh, and dead yellow skin all over. After a game, my feet burn all night, Pearce. Sometimes I come down to this dock and soak my feet in the water.”

“It’s freezing, sir,” he said as I lowered my feet into the water, grimaced, then pulled them back onto the dock and wiped them dry with a handkerchief.

“I don’t know whether it hurts or feels good, Pearce, but I do it when the pain in my feet is real bad. I think it helps me but I’m not sure. That’s the way I feel about this school sometimes. I think it’s doing me a lot of good because so many people tell me it’s good for me. But it hurts. It hurts all the time. Are you glad you came here, Pearce?”

“Yes, sir,” he said without a trace of hesitation.

“I mean really, Pearce.”

“I like it here, Mr. McLean,” he said. “I don’t like it when they call me nigger or coon or spear-chucker, but I knew that was going to happen. I like the military and I want to make a career out of the Army when I graduate. I’ve wanted to do that since I was a little kid, and this is the best preparation in the world.”

“You’re looking good, Pearce,” I said, studying him with admiration. “A very sharp young knob. You’re only about four months away from being a sophomore.”

“I’m going to make it through this school, Mr. McLean,” he said with sudden, absolute fervor. “I’m going to do what I have to do to make it because I’m going to wear one of those one day.”

He pointed to my ring.

“Here,” I said, removing my ring. “Try it on for size.”

He placed the ring carefully, reverently on his left hand. It fit perfectly.