by Pat Conroy
When Capers was trying on a beautifully cut London Fog raincoat, I had gasped at the price and said, “What’ll you need that for, Capers?”
Mrs. Middleton looked quizzical, then said, “Do you think that it doesn’t rain in the upper portions of the state?”
“Sure,” I said. “But you can always duck inside somewhere. Run home.”
“A gentleman doesn’t duck anywhere,” Mrs. Middleton explained. “And a gentleman is prepared for all exigencies of weather. You’ll need a black umbrella to walk young ladies back to their sorority houses in the rain, Capers. What on earth will you do about those young ladies, Jack?”
“Guess I’ll grab their hand and tell ’em to run for it with me.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Middleton, but I saw Mr. Berlin suppressing a smile.
Though I tried to assimilate all the protocols of college life in my off-key first semester, there was too much detail to process in such a short time. I was too self-conscious and disheveled to make a perfect fit into the complex pecking order of the best fraternities. I watched the stir that followed Capers’ entrance into a fraternity mixer and realized that it was something far more mysterious than London Fog that made these potential brothers lukewarm and noncommittal when I trailed like a pilot fish behind Capers from party to party. The courtesies were all observed to the letter, yet I could feel my appearance creating almost no disturbances as I drifted from house to house in search of that perfect comfort zone that would tell me subliminally that I had come, at last, to the right place. Though no one told me straight-out, I became aware that I was not even remotely desirable to the top-rank fraternities on campus and was at best a low to mid-list candidate in the second-rate fraternities. Their surgery was done wordlessly and without anesthesia. Long before the fraternities made their final choices, I knew I was not in the running and I told all my friends from high school that I had decided to be an Independent.
Many years later, I would admit to myself that my fierce championing of the antiwar movement would have been unnecessary if SAE could have gotten beyond my mail-order catalog attire and the towering, unsettling rawness of my entrance into parties. The aura of the small town still clung to me; the cheap scent of the backwater followed my silent wanderings as I tried my best to find my own niche on the Carolina campus. I had expected to still spend most of my time with my best friends from Waterford and simply add dazzling names to that list as we entered into each and every phase of campus life. It troubled me, then displeased me that Capers and Ledare were taken out of circulation with friends like me as soon as they arrived on campus. While fraternities were courting Capers with an internecine ferocity, the sororities had practically gone to war to win Ledare’s approval.
Mike had joined forces with the ZBT’s, the Jewish fraternity, from the day he entered Carolina on the run and on the move. He was foresighted and clear-thinking and he knew where he was going. He had wanted to work in the movie industry since he was in high school, but he had to make his way toward filmdom. Though he majored in Business Administration, Mike immediately began to take every course the English department offered that had anything at all to do with film. He also went to the movies every day and made careful notes about what he thought about each and every film he saw. Whenever the lights went out in a movie theater and the credits began to roll on a huge screen, Mike was a perfectly happy man. College life fully engaged him with its extraordinarily busy social life, the seriousness of its academic course work, and the opportunity that it provided an ambitious boy like Mike to extend his horizons as far as his wit and depth could take him. Since he had come from a family that deeply loved him, Mike assumed that everyone he met would surrender to his basic good nature, and almost everyone did. His smile was infectious and sprang out of his generous yet inquisitional nature. He wanted to know the life story of everyone he passed and he had time to talk to anyone. He had a small genius for drawing out shy people and bringing them along as observers and cheerleaders in his fast-talking, pixilated world. On campus, he became famous for carrying an 8-millimeter camera everywhere he went. His skill with a camera slowly turned to a kind of artistry.
At the university, only Shyla seemed to remain unchanged in the heady atmospherics of college life. None of the vainglory and maneuvering among the coeds seemed of any interest to her at all. Since she was the prettiest Jewish girl on campus, and seemed to grow prettier every day, from the moment she set foot into her room in Capstone House she dated a whole series of the most desirable and attractive Jewish boys on campus, including the president of ZBT. She joined the newspaper staff of the Gamecock her first week and won a minor part in the first theatrical production of the young season in Timon of Athens. Nothing about her seemed changed or forced or derivative, and whenever I saw her I could turn a page backward in my life and see where I had once been by merely gauging her reaction to me. Though Shyla had dared me to fall in love with her the summer before when we danced in the Middletons’ doomed beach house, she knew that I was not yet ready. She was patient and serene and confident that our history in the oak tree would eventually bring me to her. We often met for lunch in the Russell House and continued our childhood habit of telling each other everything. The one thing both of us agreed on was how much we missed Jordan and wished he had matriculated at the university instead of following in his father’s footsteps to the Citadel. Neither of us thought the free-spirited Jordan would blossom in the Citadel’s brutal trial by fire for its six hundred plebes.
Jordan’s first letters began to arrive soon after the ordeal of plebe week was over and classes began. Under the cover of taking notes for his American history class, he wrote long diatribes about the indignities he and the other freshmen were forced to endure under the ungoverned rule of young sadists. “I wrote my mother a letter and thanked her for sending me to this wonderful hellhole. I reminded her that this is the same school that produced that wonderful sport she married and that some of these guys were actually making me miss my father. I’ve got this first sergeant, named Bell, who has taken a particular dislike to yours truly because he thinks the expression on my face reflects a bad attitude. Bell has the IQ of a Tater Tot and has no idea how bad my attitude is nor how bad I plan for it to become. I came here because my old man hates the fact that I’m alive and going around claiming to be his natural-born son. This whole thing’s a bad idea. My roommate loves all this and his ambition’s to be a sniper in Vietnam. It’s like rooming with Heinrich Himmler. Ask Shyla and Ledare if they’ll put hickeys all over my neck when they see me. Oh, but I neglected to tell you about the rich intellectual life at the Citadel. They showed the freshmen a stag movie last night where a woman makes love to a donkey. Believe me, both of us would’ve chosen the donkey. And my roommate, bless his fascist heart, is very proud of his ability to fart on command. He has shared this prized piece of information with his squad sergeant and he now farts loudly and happily whenever called upon to strut his stuff. If I thought about how much I miss all of you, I couldn’t last another fifteen minutes here. Can you drive down to see me on my first leave? Yours truly, in torture and pain, Jordan.”
When Jordan marched in his first dress parade, Shyla and I drove down on a Friday afternoon to take him to dinner at the Colony House. Before the upperclassmen let Jordan and his classmates leave the barracks, they conducted an impromptu sweat party where Jordan was required to perform over a hundred pushups before he could sign out at the main sally port.
When he came out to meet us, his head shaved, we saw that he had lost a great deal of weight.
“Why are you so skinny?” Shyla demanded to know.
“My first sergeant doesn’t believe that animals and plants should die just to let a dumbhead live,” Jordan said. “His mother taught him not to waste food and feeding a knob is, by definition, wasting food.”
“Is this school teaching you anything?” I asked. “What’re you majoring in?”
“Spit shine.”
“No, reall
y,” Shyla said, laughing. “What’s your field of study?”
“Hand grenades. With a minor in flame throwers.”
We spent the night teasing and joking, but Jordan could not hide the deep sadness that provided both text and color for every story he told about life in the barracks. Another boy’s face was so disfigured by acne they forced him to wear a paper bag over his head at mess. A freshman from Waycross, Georgia, who had grown up poaching alligators in the black silences of the Okefenokee Swamp, had a nervous breakdown in physics class.
What was getting to Jordan was the suffering of others; long ago he had grown accustomed to his own suffering. The cruelty he faced from the upperclassmen seemed buoyant and lightweight compared to his father’s far more studied tyranny. Almost alone among the freshmen, Jordan found the meanspiritedness of boys almost comical. What he did find disheartening was that the Citadel seemed to represent an institutional mimicry of his father’s dark spirit.
Before we even ordered, Jordan had eaten the whole loaf of freshly baked bread and a whole stick of butter that the waiter had brought with our menus. He also put four lumps of sugar into his iced tea and apologized profusely to his dinner companions.
“I’m hungry enough to eat the crotch out of a rag doll,” Jordan said.
“Jordan!” Shyla warned.
“Sorry, Shyla. I heard that at mess. No cadet can finish a sentence without using the word ‘fuck’ at least once.”
“I thought I liked Carolina,” I admitted, “until I saw your place. Now I know I’m ecstatic.”
“Jack’s having a little trouble adjusting,” Shyla said, “but the rest of us are in hog heaven. You ought to quit this dump and go to a real college.”
“I’d love to find an honorable way out,” Jordan said. “If I just quit, my father’d never pay my way to another college. The problem is that there’s no real honorable way out of the Citadel except with a diploma.”
“Think of something,” Shyla said. “Jack needs a friend. Who’d’ve thought the big fella would be lonely on a campus chock-full of ten thousand people?”
“Jack’s shy,” Jordan said. “It’ll take him a while to get his feet on the ground.”
A voice above us said, “Cadet Elliott.”
The three of us looked up to see a Citadel upperclassman standing above Jordan. Jordan immediately stood up at strict attention and entered into a semi-brace much to the consternation of the cadet.
“Not here, Elliott. At ease, mister. I’m eating dinner with my parents and I couldn’t help but notice you unfastened the zipper on your dress blouse when you sat down. That’s an upper-class privilege.”
“I wasn’t aware of that, sir.”
“Report to my room ten minutes before taps, smackhead,” the cadet whispered, then smiled as he looked down at Shyla. He was about to introduce himself when I grabbed him hard by the ear and jerked his head down toward me.
“Hey, acne breath,” I said into the boy’s ear. “I’m a patient in the state mental hospital on Bull Street. I killed my mother by stabbing her in the eye with a butcher knife. I never have to want to come looking for you, but if my cousin Jordan ever tells me to …” I lifted a steak knife off the tablecloth.
“Let him alone, Jack,” Jordan said. “I’m very sorry, sir. My cousin doesn’t get out of the hospital very often.”
“I’m his nurse, Cadet,” Shyla said. “I hope he didn’t frighten you. We’ll have to increase his medication.”
I released the frightened sergeant who said, “Thanks, Elliott. Forget about reporting to me. Enjoy your evening.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jordan said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to join us, sir?”
“My mother didn’t suffer,” I said. “She died instantly.”
As the cadet hurried back across the darkened room, Jordan said, giggling, “His name is Manson Summey and he’s the meanest son of a bitch in the corps. He eats knobs for breakfast and brags about how many he’s run out of the corps this year.”
“Let him run you out. Come to Carolina,” Shyla said. “We’ve got dormitories full of girls who’d just lap you up like cream. There’s liquor, parties galore, big band music …”
“Then why’s Jack so lonely?” Jordan asked, reaching across through the candlelit gloom and squeezing my wrist.
“Because he’s Jack,” Shyla said. “He thought we’d all grow up and you, me, Capers, Mike, Ledare, and him would all live in one great big house.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I said.
“Sounds like heaven to me,” Jordan said, inhaling deeply as his steak arrived from the kitchen.
“It’s impractical,” Shyla said. “It shows no imagination.”
“It shows good taste, Shyla,” I said. “I know who my friends are.”
It took Jordan Elliott another month of the plebe system before he decided he had a solution fantastic enough to get himself expelled from the Citadel, but in such a way that he could leave with both his dignity intact and his father’s blessing. His father had believed that the Citadel would harden his son in those places that his mother had made soft in her husband’s absences. What the general demanded was that the school do what he failed to do—make Jordan unlike his mother in every way.
The plan Jordan devised required the help of his friends at the University of South Carolina and made clear that Jordan had already developed his natural gift for strategic planning. Clear vision was an old habit of his and the stress of the plebe system only strengthened his proficiency at making correct decisions on the spur of the moment.
Two weeks before the annual Citadel-Furman football game, ten Citadel cadets had taken a weekend leave and kidnapped the sleek Arabian horse that served as Furman’s mascot. The horse was a docile animal, beautifully proportioned and easily handled, but in the cadets’ haste to make off with the Furman paladin, the horse was accidentally blinded by two cadets far too drunk to be loading a strange horse properly. When the cadets realized how serious the injuries to the mascot really were, they did what they considered the humane thing and put the horse down with a single pistol shot to the brain. One cadet made an error of judgment by spray painting the word “Citadel” on the dead animal’s body.
Before this incident, Furman and the Citadel had been bitter rivals indeed. Afterward, the Citadel represented and embodied everything demonic and unspeakable in the modern world to this pretty, Baptist-governed college, which sat in the rolling hills outside of Greenville. The once placid and genteel student body of Furman rose up in sheer, barbaric fury when the news of the atrocity spread across campus. A photograph of the slain horse was on the front page of every newspaper in the state, and, fearing reprisals, the president of the Citadel, General Nugent, restricted all cadets to the campus until after the Furman game was over. Several Furman fraternities pledged to hang the Citadel bulldog at half-mast on the state capitol flagpole in honor of the slain paladin.
Jordan Elliott’s first sergeant, Manson Summey, was visiting his girlfriend at Furman on the Sunday morning when the dead paladin’s picture appeared in the Greenville Morning News. After kissing his girl good-bye at the entrance to her dormitory, fifty Furman boys, including half the football team, met Manson at his car.
When they returned Manson Summey to the Citadel campus two days later, they had shaved Manson’s head and genitalia, dressed him in girl’s panties, and covered him with chicken shit and chicken feathers they had gathered from a local farm in Greenville. They painted the word “Furman” on six buildings on the Citadel campus, including the chapel. The cadets vowed revenge when Manson was found chained and badly beaten up, lying in the middle of the parade ground. But General Nugent, after a conference call with the governor and the president of Furman, restricted all of his cadets to their rooms and stationed guards around the campus to prevent further incursions by Furman students. Tensions between the schools heated up to dangerous levels, and both football teams vowed to win the game that would take place in Charleston
the following Saturday. Great male energy, undirected and captious, was loose in the air and the Citadel campus felt like a small warlike principality that was under siege. The word “Furman” had become an expletive among the aroused cadets for whom the beating and humiliation of Manson Summey had erased all memory of the death of Furman’s horse.
Then freshman Jordan Elliott went to his company commander, Pinner Worrell, with a brilliant plan that combined military strategy with a biblical sensibility for vengeance. The plan was simple but cunning, and Cadet Captain Worrell agreed to sponsor it and even participate in it if Jordan could convince three non-Citadel people to drive the getaway cars. Jordan assured his commander that he had lined up the three drivers perfect for an operation that combined a love of fast driving and a passion for taking risks.
“Can they keep their mouths shut, Elliott?” Cadet Worrell asked.
“I’d trust them with my life, sir,” Cadet Elliott assured him.
“But you’re a knob, Elliott. The lowest form of waste product. A wet dream. A used Kotex. An ass-wipe. There will mostly be upperclassmen on this project. The crème de la crème. Veritable gods, Elliott, veritable gods.”
“Sir, I’d trust the lives of veritable gods with these three friends. Even a used Kotex like me.”
“I’ll be responsible for all military and strategic aspects of this top-secret mission, dumbhead. Next year, I’ll be in Vietnam killing gooks, plundering villages, pacifying the countryside, and generally kicking quite a bit of Asian ass. You, Elliott, will be responsible for transportation only. You’re only a knobule, a sperm cell of a true Citadel man. I’ll teach you everything you need to know about the subtleties of military genius.”