Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  As he had expected, Hanson was paired off with Henry Johnson, a black kid from Newark who slept in the bunk below him. Henry wrote his mother regularly, never used obscenities, yet was well liked by the other black recruits. He and Hanson were almost identical in size and endurance and had become regular rivals, yet they had, grudgingly, come to like each other.

  They put on the equipment and began circling toward each other as the circle around them tightened and roared, “Kill him!”

  The inside of Hanson’s helmet was slick with sweat and smelled like a locker room. Through the grid of the face mask he could see his own hands on the pugil stick, Henry Johnson moving toward him, and the brutal ring of screaming faces. He felt as though he were inside a machine, powering it with his arms and legs—looking through the face mask was like peering out of a ventilator grid. His hands felt numb in the padded gloves, and his legs sank into the sand.

  But he discovered that he was able to read Henry Johnson’s moves and get out of their way or block them. It was easy. His senses were heightened to the point that everything was very clear and moving slowly. It was as though he weren’t even involved. As he moved and blocked the blows, he studied the faces of the other soldiers and watched the gray and yellow storm clouds boiling toward the parade field.

  It was interesting, countering the blows while handicapped with the equipment and loose footing, watching Henry’s eyes through the shifting grid of the face mask. The crowd was shouting for more action, but Hanson was working out a rhythm, his defense shaping Henry’s attack. For the first time since he had arrived at the induction center, he felt that he was in control of his life.

  Then something hit him flat on the side of his helmet—he tasted his own salty blood—and his legs were kicked out from beneath him. He looked up from the sand and, through the grid work of the mask, saw the DI standing over him, filling up his field of view. His face was wide and angular, hard, a pulse beating on the side of his nose. The DI placed one jump boot in the center of Hanson’s chest and slowly began to put his weight behind it. His lips were moving, but Hanson couldn’t hear him at first. The sun was glaring down behind the DI, and sand grated against the back of the helmet as Hanson tried to shift his head.

  “. . . ain’t no game,” the DI’s voice said, the words and the movement of his lips beginning to make sense. “You ain’t playing tennis. This is practice at killing people. This ain’t golf, or some bullshit sport for polite people.

  “You got something going with Johnson? You two been playin’ in the shower? You supposed to kill him. That’s all, not play with him.

  “Young man, you best work at killing, ’cause that’s how you gonna stay alive. You think too much, Hanson. You know that? You think too much an’ make what’s simple, complicated.

  “Now take off that shit and get back in the circle.”

  The DI turned and looked around the circle from beneath the wide brim of his hat. “That’s what it all about, people,” he said. “The little man tryin’ to kill you. You got to understand that now—ain’t gonna be no time to figure it out when he’s comin’ at you.

  “You people think I’m lyin’? You think I’m standing out here in the sun tellin’ stories? You people got to learn it. You got to mentally prepare yourselves to dig in and kill old Newyen van Newyen before he kill you. You got to do it quick—ain’t got time to think about it.

  “Now remember that when you out here with those sticks.”

  Hanson began watching the other fighters in a different way. He could read them. By their eyes, by the way they shifted their shoulders and hips, he could tell how and when they were going to strike. He was surprised, and he wondered if everyone could do it. He’d felt good in the ring with Henry for that minute or so when he held the pugil stick. For that minute he felt that he had “dug in,” that he had, for the first time, held his ground against the Army. For a minute he had risen above the grinding anonymity of the past weeks. He felt strong.

  After everyone had fought, Vernel Friday stepped into the ring. “Drill Sergeant,” he shouted, “Private Friday requests permission to go again. I didn’t even break sweat that first time.”

  Friday was the biggest, strongest man in the training company. He was black, he was from Detroit, and he was alive with rage. He had been a gang leader “back on the block” in the city, and he was a squad leader in the company. When he broke into chow lines and PX lines, no one tried to stop him.

  “All right,” the DI said to the circle of men, “Friday says he wants to”—and he looked at Friday and smiled—“hone his skills with the pugil stick against another opponent. Who wants to try him on?”

  Friday stood in the middle of the ring, shoulders back, looking contemptuously at the other recruits.

  Hanson knew he could beat Friday if he did it right then. He could picture himself doing it. He felt as if he were in a movie and he was the only actor who had seen the script.

  “I’ll go again, Drill Sergeant,” Hanson said, his own voice startling him as the words came out. For an instant he was dizzy with fear, but it was too late to back out. He turned away from the fear as he might turn away, finally, from the endless complaining of a lifelong companion. He looked at Friday and felt solid on his feet again.

  The DI looked at Hanson and grinned. “You got something against Vernel, Han-son?”

  “No, Drill Sergeant. I just thought I should go out there and beat him.”

  “Well, then,” he said, still smiling, “you better get started.

  “Throw him that gear,” he said to his assistant. “We don’t want him to lose any, you know, momentum.

  “He’s all yours, Hanson.”

  Vernel Friday stood easily at the far arc of the circle as Hanson walked slowly toward him. Hanson could see, though, that he was disappointed. He’d expected a better match than a quiet little white dude. Beating Hanson was no problem, but he’d have to look cool doing it, knock his dick in the dirt and not break a sweat.

  Hanson broke into a run, holding the pugil stick across his body with both hands. He slammed into Friday, driving him through the ring of recruits, catching him low, before he’d had a chance to get set, and knocking him on his back.

  And then he was standing over Friday, swinging the stick like a club, slamming down at his head and throat as Friday tried to block the blows with his own pugil stick, crabbing away from the blows through the sand.

  The DI grabbed the pugil stick from behind as Hanson brought it up for another blow. “That’s all,” he said. “You won.”

  After the company was dismissed, the white recruits gathered around Hanson, laughing and slapping him on the back. Hanson enjoyed the attention, and it had been easy.

  There was talk of forming a “security guard” for Hanson in case the blacks went after him for humiliating Friday, and Hanson realized that it was a possibility.

  When Hanson left the mess hall that evening, Riley was slumped beneath the overhand bars, a long horizontal ladder that the recruits had to traverse before they could eat. They had to jump up, grab the first rung, then go hand over hand, rung by rung, to the opposite end.

  Hanson watched as Riley jumped, grabbed the first bar, and hung there, rocking slightly with each ragged breath.

  An olive drab tractor-trailer made a sharp left turn behind the mess hall. It moved slowly, black smoke boiling from the twin stacks on the cab. The heat was tainted by the smell of half-burned diesel fuel and the stink of old grease blowing from the back of the mess hall where the “outdoor man” on KP was hosing out the heavy garbage cans. The blue sky was cloudless except for the smeared contrails of a high-flying jet.

  The land rose slowly behind the mess hall. Past the clusters of barracks and buff-yellow Quonset huts, beyond the check points and chain-link fencing, on the only hill in sight, the huge water tower dominated the base, its red and white candy stripes wavering in the heat. Marching columns moved across the landscape like figures in an epic mural. Hanson could hear, over
the sound of Riley’s breathing, the faint cadence of a training company marching somewhere out of sight. “. . . ain’t no use in goin’ home, Jody’s got your girl and gone, ain’t no use in goin’ back, Jody’s got your Cadillac—left, left, left…”

  Riley, his fatigues dark at the armpits and crotch, was unaware of any of it, conscious only of the heat and humiliation, lost in the overwhelming indifference of the world he had somehow stumbled into.

  Riley only showed the weakness and fear that all the other recruits felt but managed, most of the time, to hide. It was as if he was burdened with the weakness of the whole company. In a way, he was the most important person there. Just as a hero must live out other men’s dreams of triumph, Riley lived out their failures.

  As Hanson watched, Riley lost his grip and collapsed in the dirt.

  The barracks smelled of paste wax, gun oil, sweat, and paint.

  “Hey. Hanson. Mister New Hero.”

  Hanson looked down at Henry Johnson in the bunk below. “Yes sir, Private Johnson, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “Vernel says not to sweat it. He told the brothers to leave you alone. But he says to tell you that you were just lucky. I told him that you were okay compared to most of these crackers.”

  “Well thanks, Henry. I didn’t know you thought so.”

  Henry laughed and said, “That ain’t no big compliment.”

  Hanson was reading when Canada and Bostic, two of Vernel Friday’s protégés, burst into the barracks, drunk on sour three-two beer. Canada was a short, stocky kid, inarticulate and always on the edge of rage over real or imagined wrongs done to him. Like some of the other black recruits, he was paranoid and almost psychotic with anger. He was likely to respond to any request, suggestion, or order with hysteria and violence, as if he could flick a little switch in his head and say, “Now I get to go crazy.” He used rage as a narcotic, as a means to shut out frustration and doubt. He was, Hanson thought, a scary guy.

  The blacks in camp knew that they were going to Vietnam as infantry troops in a matter of weeks—there had never been any question about that—and they had nothing to lose. A familiar, bitter comment to disciplinary warnings was, “What the motherfuckers gonna do, send me to Vietnam?”

  Hanson was trying to read a collection of movie reviews, a paperback book he’d found in the dog-eared little camp library. He had not seen any of the films discussed, but he read anything he could find as an escape from the routine of the camp. He’d even taken to ripping sections out of paperbacks and carrying them concealed in his fatigue pockets to read out in the field. He often carried sections of poetry books for the times when they had to stand the hour-long inspections, slipping them out of his pocket back in the third rank of the formation and holding them down at his waist, hidden by the soldier in front of him. He’d memorize stanzas to dull the pain of cramping muscles when the sun drove down into the sand of the parade ground and up into his face, when the steel helmet he wore got heavier and tighter around his head. “I will arise and go now,” he’d say to himself, memorizing Yeats, “and go to Innis-free.” It was a practice that had earned him the name “Pageman” for a while.

  “Reading. My man here, he always reading something,” Canada said, stopping at Hanson’s bunk. “Mr. Pageman. What you reading now?”

  “Book about the movies,” Hanson said, not looking up from the page. “About how to make movies.”

  “Shit,” Canada said. “You crazy, you know that?”

  “Yeah, I know. The Army made me that way.”

  “But you all right for being crazy. Vernel says you were lucky, but you all right. Hey,” he went on, “you make a movie, I’m gonna be in it, right?”

  “Right. Absolutely. Roger that. I’ll make you the hero.”

  “Awright, man here gonna put me in his movie,” Canada said, then he spun around to Riley, who was lying on the top bunk across the aisle from Hanson.

  “Hey,” he said, suddenly enraged, “you cracker motherfucker, how come you been talking about me?”

  Riley tried to smile as though they were sharing a joke, his mouth twitching into a shit-eating grin. “Aw, come on, Canada, you know I didn’t—”

  “Shut up, boy. You don’t be tellin’ me what I know. You been talking about me, and I’m telling you to apologize.”

  Riley held the tight smile and licked his upper lip. He glanced quickly over at Hanson, moving only his eyes.

  Three different record players were on in the barracks. After the first payday, the PX had been stripped of Polaroid cameras and battery-powered record players. The Beach Boys were singing “California Girls.”

  Hanson looked down at Henry Johnson and Henry met his eyes, shaking his head.

  A Puerto Rican band was going heavy on drums and maracas, and at the far end of the building, James Brown screamed the song “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” over and over.

  Neither Canada nor Riley moved. Two doomed boys. Canada knew it and was trying to wield all the power, get all the revenge against the world he could, while he still had time. Riley didn’t know it, and he was a coward, afraid of getting hurt and not knowing how to avoid it.

  “You apologize to me, boy. Nobody talks about me,” Canada said, by then believing the accusation he had invented.

  Riley was still trying to smile when Canada hit him on the side of the head, the sound of bone against flesh almost lost in the music.

  “Apologize, motherfucker.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want,” Riley said, close to tears. “I apologize.”

  “That ain’t what I’m talkin’ about,” Canada said, hitting Riley again. “I want a real motherfucking apology.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “Awright then. Awright. Shit,” Canada said, hunching his head down into his shoulders like a boxer. “Shit! Motherfucker, you through talkin’ about me.”

  He smiled at Bostic, then said to Riley, “Hey, my man. Since we friends now, how about lending me five dollars?”

  “Well,” Riley began, “I don’t think—”

  “Sure you do. Take a look. If you my friend. You sayin’ you don’t want to be my friend?”

  Riley, his ear red and already beginning to swell, took out his wallet and Canada jerked it out of his hand.

  “Look here,” he said, holding the wallet open, “it’s ten in here. I’ll just take that. I’ll be sure to pay you back as soon as I get the money, my man.”

  He pocketed the money, then removed a photograph of a girl from the wallet and held it at arm’s length, frowning. “Say, look at this ugly bitch. She your girl? Or your momma? One thing for sure, she ugly. Look like a chicken. You been fucking this bitch? Shit! You a braver man than me, ’cause I’d be afraid to put my dick in that.

  “You some kind of bad dude,” Canada said, laughing. “And I been thinking you just a punk.”

  He tossed the wallet on the bunk and said, “We gotta be going. Thanks for the loan.”

  Canada and Bostic walked out of the barracks, laughing.

  Hanson looked back at his book but couldn’t concentrate. There was nothing anyone could have done for Riley. If he’d tried to defend him, it would have been worse the next time. In a way, Hanson thought, Riley deserved it.

  He reached under his pillow and felt the reassuring, solid handle of the entrenching tool he kept there. In the Army, he had finally learned, all you have is the space that you fill up with your body. That’s all they allow you to own, and there is nowhere else to go. So if somebody fucks with you, they are fucking with everything you have. At some point Hanson had decided that he’d die before he’d let anyone do to him what Canada had done to Riley. They’d have to kill him. They could tell that, and they left him alone.

  Later that night the fire guard found Billy Riley in the latrine, lying on the floor with his wrists slashed. He ran and got the duty DI, who, after seeing that Riley’s life was in no immediate danger, woke up the whole company and marched them into the la
trine.

  Riley lay crying on the red concrete floor. Toilets and sinks gleamed in the harsh light, the old plumbing whining and thrumming with water pressure.

  “Gentlemen,” the DI said to the assembled company, “think of this as a late training session, getting you out of your bunks because of this fat pussy laying on the floor. A training session on the correct, Army-approved procedure for committing suicide.”

  He reached down and grabbed Riley’s arm, wrenching it up and holding it so the company could see the blood-crusted cuts across the wrist.

  “You do not cut across the wrist like this. It is not effective, gentlemen, no!” he shouted, throwing the arm to the floor. “The blood will coagulate before you can bleed to death. All you will accomplish is to fuck up the tendons in your arm.

  “Make a fist, Riley,” he shouted. “Make a fist,” he said, grabbing Riley by the hair, “or I’ll pull your fucking head off.”

  “I can’t,” Riley sobbed.

  “That’s right,” the DI said, flinging Riley’s head to one side. “You’re gonna have a hard time jacking off from now on.”

  He turned back to the company and said, holding up his own wrist, “Cut your wrists this way, up and down, the long way. Open ’em up good, and you won’t end up like this pussy here.

  “Now, get this sorry piece of shit off the floor and outside while I call an ambulance to haul his fat ass away. And this latrine had better gleam when I come back.”

  Several of the recruits grabbed Riley’s shirt and dragged him to the door, cursing him on the way. He was sobbing, and his feet bounced and bobbed on the floor.

  Hanson lay in his bunk, looking out the window at the steel hedge of concertina wire that the recruits had to jump over when they took turns chasing each other with sections of rubber hose each night before dinner. Down at the end of the barracks, a Korean War–vintage reciprocating fan droned to the end of its circuit, hesitated, then began swinging back.