The Lords of Discipline (7 page)

In the first month of our plebe year, upperclassmen came from the other three battalions to see Pig, and the cadre would force him to strip off his shirt and stand braced as the obscene, uninvited eyes of upperclassmen examined his already famous physique. From my vantage point in the second platoon, I could see the entire ceremony, and I filled up with an immense pride for this freshman, so much a man that our inquisitors, our lean tormentors, were coming to the ranks of plebes to study the most magnificent body in the Corps. They would hit him in the stomach as hard as they could and he would take their best punches. I could not convey how beautiful Dante Pignetti looked to me then, exposed to sunlight, barechested, struck by them, admired by them, more than them. As I was witnessing the strangeness of this ceremony, I decided on the spot to make friends with him. Wisdom and a knack for survival told me that it was no foolish act to have the strongest man in the Corps tied up with my destiny. Because powerful men inspire fear, they usually have very few friends and almost never have developed the soft skills necessary to make friends; they have spent too much time developing their pectoral muscles. I also knew Pig would instinctively like me. As I watched him from a distance, I knew with absolute surety that Pig had isolated and imprisoned himself in his own physical invulnerability. He was lonely that first year, and he smiled foolishly, boyishly, when I asked him to walk downtown for a beer.

There was a disturbance outside on the gallery. The door shivered violently as someone was hurled against it. I heard shouts, profanity. Suddenly, the door was flung open and Gooch Fraser flew into the room and tumbled onto the floor. Pig was behind him and gave him a swift kick on the buttocks that sent Gooch sprawling into Mark’s luggage.

“Over here, Toecheese,” Pig ordered.

“Pig?” I said in a half-question, half-greeting.

“I can’t say hello now, paisan,” Pig answered, throwing his suitcase on the bed and snapping it open. “Toecheese has just insulted my girl.”

“I didn’t know you had a girl, Pig,” Gooch whined. Gooch Fraser was a junior sergeant and as harmless and inoffensive as a gerbil.

“You call me Mr. Pignetti. I don’t like the way you say ‘Pig.’ ”

“Please, Mr. Pignetti. I didn’t mean anything.”

“I’ve got to teach you a lesson, Toecheese,” Pig explained. “I’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m going to show you a picture of the girl you just insulted and you’ll understand why I become a wild man when someone says something nasty about her.”

“But, Pig . . .” Gooch said, desperately trying to explain.

“Shut up,” Pig yelled, slapping Gooch on the top of the head. “I’m Pignetti to you and you’re Mr. Nothin’ to me. I’d be doing myself a favor to strangle your scrawny, greasy neck. Now watch as I show you the girl you insulted.”

He reverently slid the photograph out of his suitcase. I had seen the photograph for three straight years; it was as familiar to me as the face of Lincoln on a five-dollar bill.

“There,” Pig said with obvious self-justification. “Now do you understand why I become a homicidal maniac when some nothin’ makes a dirty remark about her? Did you ever see such a beautiful woman?”

Then he slapped Gooch on the back of the head again.

“Take your beady eyes off her!” he screamed. “You’re not worthy to gaze upon such an exquisite sight. If you only knew how good she was, how kind she was, how humble, how quiet, how smart—you wouldn’t blame me for throwing you to your death off fourth division. You’d beg me to kill you. That’s how ashamed you’d be.”

“I didn’t know, Mr. Pignetti. I really didn’t know.”

“What did Gooch say, Pig?” I asked.

“I asked him if he got any pussy this summer,” Gooch explained to me with penitent, uncomprehending eyes.

Pig slapped him on the back of the head and kicked his ribs until Gooch lay hunched in a fetal position on the floor.

“Did you hear him use that word in front of Theresa?” Pig said to me.

“That’s not Theresa, Pig,” I said. “That’s a photograph of Theresa.”

“It’s the same thing to me, Will. You know that. It’s like church. When I look at the statue of the Virgin, I fill up with love. I kiss the feet of the statue like it was the mother of God herself.”

“Gooch,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. McLean.”

“It’s Will, Gooch. Apologize to the photograph of Theresa and Pig might let you go sometime this week.”

“I might rip your gall bladder out with my bare hands if you don’t,” Pig said.

“I’m sorry, Theresa,” Gooch whined. “I’m so sorry.”

Pig chopped him to the floor again with a rabbit punch to the neck. Then looking up at me again for approval, he said, “He just doesn’t learn, beloved roommate.”

“What did I do wrong?” Gooch moaned.

“You mentioned her first name. I don’t want Theresa’s name ever mentioned by a scummy tongue like yours. Its all I can do right now to keep from tearing your tongue out of your head.”

“Call her Miss Devito,” I instructed.

“I’m sorry, Miss Devito. I apologize. I’ll never do it again,” Gooch said, nearing hysteria.

“That’s better, Nothin’,” Pig said, appeased as last.

But Gooch was swept away by the theatricality of remorse. He made a swift, fervent grab at the photograph and began planting wet, sorrowful kisses all over Theresa’s dark, shining face.

A demonic howl rose from Pig’s furious lips as he began to cuff Gooch’s ears with stinging slaps that resounded throughout the room. I jumped on Pig’s back and screamed at Gooch, “Run, man. I can only hold him for a second.”

With speed born of terror, the normally phlegmatic Gooch Fraser sprinted from the room without a single wasted motion.

Pig did not move. I was wrapped around his back like a ludicrous, outsized papoose. I waited for him to separate our bodies with one of the fierce, hammering blows that he kept in his inexhaustible repertoire. But he remained motionless as though he had hibernated on the spot. Finally I spoke.

“Pig, we’re late to Abigail’s house. So let’s get ready. I don’t want to have to whip your behind before dinner.”

“Will,” he said.

“Yeh, Pig.”

“You can’t hold me for a second, beloved roommate. You can’t even hold me for a nanosecond.”

“I worked out this summer, Pig. My strength has become gorillalike.”

“Do you know what I learned over the summer?” he said in his low rumbling voice.

“No.”

“I learned how to kill a man using only my thumb.”

“Pig!” I screamed out so it could be heard throughout R Company.

“Oink,” he screamed back.

“Pig.”

“Oink.”

“Pig.”

“Oink, oink, oink, oink.”

Chapter Five

O
n Thursday, I received an invitation to meet with General Durrell in his office after lunch. I put on my full-dress salt-and-pepper uniform, shined my shoes and brass, and stood before the mirror as Mark expertly wrapped me in the scarlet sash required when a cadet had an audience with our remote and distinguished president. An invitation from the General was not an invitation at all. In the complex vernacular of military euphemism, it was an inescapable summons. I had sent back word through the orderly of the guard that I would be delighted and honored to accept the General’s invitation.

Delighted, honored, and extremely agitated, I arrived at the General’s office at precisely 1300 hours. Generals made me very nervous, and I avoided all encounters with them when humanly possible. But Bentley Durrell was not only a general, he was a sublime prototype of the species. On campus, General Durrell was known simply as “The Great Man.” People actually referred to him in that grandiose way, even in his presence. He was the Institute’s living memorial, their single, undeniable totem of distinction in international affairs. Seventeen nations had honored him; fourteen universities had granted him honorary degrees. The museum of the Institute on the third floor of the library overflowed with mementoes that traced the course of his exploits in the Second World War and the Korean conflict. Some considered him the greatest South Carolinian since John C. Calhoun. The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell’s ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals.

If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms. Normally, he spoke slowly and his modulation had an icy control to it, but I had witnessed many times when he had caught fire and when he did, when he arrived at a subject that consumed him, then you could see the eyes change, not the color, but the light behind the eyes, which flared whenever an article of his unwavering faith arose in a speech or a conversation. During speeches to the Corps, the indisputable power of his own rhetoric would affect him so viscerally that he would dance along a thin, precarious edge of control in constant danger of plunging headlong into much darker and more radical passions. When praising the nation or the nobility of the founding fathers’ vision, we had known him to break down almost completely, not to weep of course, but to falter, his voice breaking, his emotions poised unsteadily in a miraculous duet between virility and tears. It was the only hint that there was fury beneath the form.

Otherwise he possessed the markings of the military thoroughbred. His hair was a distinguished gray of that special silver that only seems to grow on the heads of powerful, supremely confident men. It was close-cropped and stayed in place even in high winds. His nose was long and finely shaped; generals are a long-nosed, strong-jawed race. He was bred to wear the stars. The Presidency of the Institute was a fitting destiny for a man who had received his grandfather’s cavalry sword as a christening gift. He wore the sword whenever he reviewed the troops at Friday afternoon parade. He had kept it on his wall when he was a cadet officer at the Institute. Though he had had a congressional appointment to West Point, he had chosen to attend the Institute instead, in affirmation of his belief in the South and in Southern ways. By spurning the Point, he was following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. He had graduated from the Institute with extraordinary distinction and, crowning a brilliant Army career, became the first four-star general who had ever graduated from The College. As the most famous and successful of all graduates of the Institute, he offered an example to all of us of the hope and promise and possibility that life offered on the other side of graduation. And the administration constantly reminded us that Bentley Durrell had once entered the Gates of Legrand as a freshman, had once marched anonymously in the ranks of plebes, had once slept beneath the arches of second battalion. There had been a time when Bentley Durrell had been recognizably human before he walked off campus and into the history of his times. It was thought that after he returned from World War II, he would become either President of the Institute or President of the United States. He waited for his country and the Republican party to call him from his South Carolina plantation, but both decided to call Dwight David Eisenhower instead. General Durrell, it is said, never quite forgave either for their bad judgment or inferior taste. And when the Board of Visitors asked him to assume the Presidency of the Institute, he accepted with magnanimity and a certain desperation.

When I entered his office, I saluted him sharply, snapped my heels together in a satisfying, phony click, and fixed my expression in a fierce cadet’s scowl that I hoped would pass for high seriousness. In my full dress, I looked like one of Napoleon s grenadiers, even though I felt like the king of the penguins.

The General waved me into my seat with a magisterial sweep of his long slender arm. Then he studied me at his leisure. He settled back into his chair behind his vast mahogany desk without his eyes ever leaving mine. From the intensity of his gaze, it was apparent that he was accustomed to staring other men into submission. He was an athlete of the stare; he enjoyed the sport. I did not and I diverted my eyes about the room. There was a cold symmetry to General Durrell’s office, a rigorous attention to detail that was both fastidious and obsessive.

“Do you think we can go all the way this year, Mr. McLean?” the General said, his soft, lethargic voice brushed by the sweet cadences and slurred elisions of the upcountry.

“All the way, sir?” I asked.

“Yes, I want to know if we can go all the way, if we can grab the brass ring.”

“All the way to what, sir? I don’t understand what you mean, sir.”

“That’s perfectly obvious, Mr. McLean,” he said, smiling and folding his hands neatly on his desk like a schoolboy. “I want to know if our basketball team can go all the way and win the Southern Conference championship.”

“I hope so, sir. I think we’ll have a pretty good team, sir,” I answered, relieved that the subject was basketball.

“A pretty good team is not good enough and neither is your answer. I suggest that you answer, ‘We’ll have a great team, sir, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t win the national championship.’ ”

“We’ll have a great team, sir, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t win the national championship,” I replied with the required brio, although I could think of a hundred reasons why we wouldn’t win that championship.

“Splendid! Splendid!” he cried out. “It’s all in the mind, Mr. McLean. The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism. I saw it when I led troops into battle. I never lost a single battle in my career as a field commander, because the word ‘retreat’ was not a part of my vocabulary. I didn’t know what it meant and neither did my men. The exact same thing applies to athletics. So do you think we can go all the way this year?”

“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t win the national championship, sir,” I repeated, feeling even more idiotic.

“That’s the spirit, Mr. McLean. You said it with even more enthusiasm the second time. Keep repeating it over and over again, and it will become an article of faith to you and your teammates. I want that kind of enthusiasm to infect the Corps this year and every year. I despise negativism, don’t you, Mr. McLean?”