by W. S. Penn
“Fuck you, Woody,” I thought, heading for the gym. “You ain’t gonna leave me holding the ball.”
I became the top cadet in my class, earning the spats, bandillero, and shiny helmet the way officers and top executives earn their rewards. With the care and assiduity of a scribe, I copied the answers of A through E onto a thin strip of paper, scrolling it into a dismantled Timex I bought on one of our trips to Mexico and telling Joanne, when she asked what I was doing, that I was looking for time. I found lots of it. The answers gave me confidence and the Honor Platoon gave me hope and when that failed, I crushed a dexamil spansule and dissolved it into lemonade, following that with another. I could ride with David into Ensenada and back, arriving just in time for an exam in political science for which I was ready, knowing that I would pass simply because of the length of my answers.
I became theoretical, and I could sit up all night with Sara and David and the Tompsons, talking, discussing ideas, rolling words around on my tongue like expensive lozenges. Delia Tompson would sometimes stop and look at me funny, as though she were wondering how I had changed from a goof into someone who believed everything he said. I didn’t care. It didn’t bother me at all when David began to ask me, “Aren’t you doing a few too many of those?” each time I popped another pill. I’d laugh and explain with boyish delight that I had all plastic parts.
When father commented on the weight I’d lost at Thanksgiving, I told him it was basketball (which I had quit). Mother’s way of taking notice of what was happening was to unlock the ladder of locks on her front door and stand there with her mouth open until she was able to say, “It’s a ghost of himself.” Mother had a way of making one look into mirrors, and this time instead of umber-colored skin I saw the color purple ringing eyes as beady as a Gila monster’s.
“I’m now,” I told the shadowy reflection. “I am in the world, among the dangs, enjoying my hour of last things.”
“Death gives life meaning,” I told Sara. “You’ve got to live on the cutting edge.”
“Yeah, right,” Sara said. “In the belly of the beast. At the heart of darkness. Downhill all the way,” she said, matching me title for title.
When I told her how David had talked a prostitute into coming to our motel room for his amigo in Ensenada one night, Sara refused to laugh. I didn’t tell her how I had known that I was past knowing when David managed, finally, to wake me up. Nor did I mention how I had felt that death would be a relief, at least the death of the tequila worms that seemed to have squatted in the abandoned corridors of my intestines. I couldn’t remember what had been said beyond the whore’s swearing at David for his little joke, and the picture of David laughing at my futile attempts to focus had made me break everything breakable in the room before he returned again, matching—with the infallible instinct of the drug addict—my sense of betrayal with the certainty of humiliation. Most of all, I didn’t tell Sara that I had been scared, really scared, and only the notion that Death owed me one had kept me alive. Instead, I tried to make the story light-hearted, exaggerating details to make it funny for her.
She didn’t laugh. “Alley. Oh, Alley,” she said, shaking her head. “I wish …” She looked like a woman who doesn’t believe in the life she witnesses and yet sees no alternative. “I don’t know how this happened,” she said, laughing sarcastically.
“What?”
She shook her head again and bit her lip. Her eyes were moist. “I can’t,” she said.
“Want one?” I offered her a dexamil, which she knocked from my hand.
While I was down on my hands and knees, trying to find the capsule which had rolled under my desk, she said, “Adam offers Eve the apple. It’s almost funny.”
“Found it,” I said, standing up. “These little tigers cost money, you know.”
“Oh, Alley. You’ve got to quit this. The next step is naturalism. The Stephen Crane Prize for speed freaks who have cooked their imaginations.” She looked at me, reaching out to take hold of my hand. “What would Elanna say, if she knew?”
“Listen. Lay off, will you? I’ll do what I want. The more you try to tell me how to behave, the more I’m going to want to do this just to show nobody tells me how to behave.” I didn’t like her bringing Elanna into this. “You’re worse than the Vegomatic, you know that? Except we aren’t married.”
“Sometimes I think maybe we are,” Sara said bitterly.
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“Never mind.” She sighed the way a parent will when faced with the persistent illogic of a child she gives in to out of love. “All right,” she said. “Here. Give it to me.” I handed the dexamil to her. “You have some water?” she asked.
“Beer,” I said, going to Woody’s dormitory-sized refrigerator and taking a can out and opening it. “Is that all right?”
“Why not?” Sara said. “Why the hell not.”
CHAPTER TEN
44.
I took so much speed that I began to lose all concentration. Everything became vague, shapeless, and I was fast going nowhere.
Sara took pills when I offered, figuring that every one she took was one I couldn’t take. That made me unhappy. I’d bought the Cracker-Jacks mythology of the sixties, that you shared everything, even the surprise that came with every box. But it wasn’t good for Sara.
The December rains came, making the sky turn dirty like the tiles in a bus station restroom. Due dates for term papers fluttered around like dying butterflies and with final exams approaching the campus took on all the pleasanter aspects of a city morgue. Woody’s permanent smile wilted, and he seemed content to stay in with Joanne and study. Sara became bitchy, her adrenal glands overtaxed by worry and the occasional dexamil. David sank into reading potboilers like Uhuru, Hawaii, becoming solitary in his boredom while everyone else jogged to and from the library. Rachel, according to the postcard from Sanchez, became pregnant.
One good aspect to speed was the asymptote of its effects. I could increase the amounts to match the need until finally just the idea of taking more made me tired, and I found myself falling asleep, snoring like a dog in a field of ragweed. The time I bought chemically became instants of euphoria followed by miles of dullness. I became stubborn in my dullness, preferring, like Bartleby, Not To.
The smiles of senior cadets and officers in R.O.T.C. turned downward into frowns resembling an unhappy Kilroy painted beside the tracks of endless railroads. Almost daily, I forced the Army to remind me of its Commandments, and I began to collect more demerits than any cadet in the history of the college, if not the Corps. I refused to polish my brass if I had to walk through rain or fog to class. The rain was going to tarnish it anyway. Had I forgotten that first training film? No. But it seemed to me that Sammy had been right all along, at least about that.
One thing led to another, and soon enough I was wearing a peace symbol to parade and firing from the hip on the target range.
“I didn’t think you were cut out to be a soldier,” Proctor Tompson said over the dinner of baby beef tongue Delia had cooked for us.
I was amusing Sara, Delia, and him with a weak imitation of the humorless master sergeant who had thrown me off the target range. Permanently. He’d caught me shooting from the hip like Chuck Connors on “The Rifleman.” Delia was being quiet, listening like a Texan to Country and Western, chewing a bite of beef tongue and looking at me in a way that made me wary.
“May as well shoot from the hip. Did you know that eighty percent of the grunts in Double U Double U Two never fired at anyone?” I said. “Some retired general went around and interviewed soldiers from both sides, and only twenty per cent admitted actually to aiming at another person. Do you know what that means?”
“It means,” the Proctor said with his ability to tie everything up in bundles like Boy Scouts on a newspaper drive, “that the percentage of people who kill on the battlefield is the same as the percentage who make a killing in the stock market. Maybe they’re the same people. Or their
heirs, at least.”
“It means,” Sara said, laughing, “that you’re as good a soldier as any one else. Shit, even you can hit a row of sandbags.”
“As long as it holds still,” I said. I took a bite of tongue. I could barely keep from gagging on the texture, but I managed to eat it for Mrs. Tompson.
“You know what your problem is?” Delia said.
She set her knife across the edge of the plate and took a sip of the wine the Proctor had brought up from his small but tasteful cellar. She jabbed the air in front of me with her fork.
“You level everything out. You treat everything as though it’s equally important to everything else. The only time you take anything seriously,” she said, giving Sara an apologetic look, “is when you’re on drugs.”
In the ensuing silence, my cousin could have delayed not one but two West German trains. Sara looked frightened. “Alley,” she began.
“You’re right,” I admitted, hanging my head with the weight of the affection I had for all of them and staring at the veins and vessels in a slice of baby beef tongue. “A commander is as good as a carrot to me. With enough Vitamin A, you don’t need carrots. The uniforms of the military are no more or less respectable than the Jesus jeans worn by Elanna’s old Berkeley friends. One dandelion’s head is the same as any other, a Gila is a Gila and you can tell one from the other only if you give them names like George.”
Later, Sara came by my room to tell me she was sorry. I sat, knees pulled up on the bed, leaning against the cold stone wall of the room, reading and rereading the label of a fifth of J.D.
“Jack Daniels,” I said, waving the bottle at her. “Son of Jim Beam and blood brother to Mr. Walker. Fire water that John Wayne trades Mexicans in westerns for their soul. Whee-ski. Bourbon in old Kin-tuck-ee. Want some?”
“Alley. I’m sorry,” Sara said.
“Not half as sorry as I am, Mizz Custer.”
“Oh. Wow. Listen, I told Delia about the speed because I care about you. I didn’t want her to bring it up that way. Maybe she didn’t know how else to bring it up. I know it seems like I betrayed you, but I didn’t. You don’t see that, do you?”
“Did you mention that you do a little yourself?” I asked, hating myself for smirking.
“She can figure that out for herself.”
“Right.”
“Have you ever thought about why I do it?”
“Because it’s free.”
Sara jumped like a hippie surprised by rednecks. Before she slammed out of my room, she said, “I was trying to keep you from your loneliness.”
“Solitude,” I said, correcting her.
“Looks pretty lonely to me, fart face,” she said. “See ya around.”
By the time my roommate Woody staggered in pretending to be inebriated on cherry extract, I was staring into the empty bottle of J.D. as though the whiskey were love, trying to convince myself that there was more where that had come from.
David returned to college from holidays with his folks with the hint of sidelocks and wearing a little round cap.
“If you put feathers in it,” I said, trying to cheer him up, “it’d keep your head warm.”
David was changed, as though whatever his parents had told him weighed him down. He wasn’t bitter about it but rather accepted it, except on Friday nights when he had to be in his room by sunset, and for a while I would drop by his room and keep him company. As he said, what was he to do on Friday nights, study? It was David who corrected my notions about the menorah and the Feast of Lights, and although I felt a certain loss, no longer able to envy Jews because their G-d had taken those extra days to create their world, I did envy him for belonging to something larger than himself. When he began to demand what had Indians contributed to Western Civilization, I managed to smile and joke about how a hamster named Custer had died for his sins.
“Indians are Eastern,” I protested. “They live in space, more than in your kind of time.” David’s snickering when I said that wounded me more and more.
At the same time, I saw with the secret wisdom of spiders that I was being coughed up out of Rotsy like phlegm from an asthmatic. Counseled regularly by Captain R.J. Morrisey about the number of my demerits, I knew the Army was trying to tolerate me the way the Army Air Force had tolerated my uncle. After all, I still drilled with energetic precision and my exam scores did seem dishonestly high to Morrisey. When it came down to it, though, Captain Morrisey could not fathom how a boy opposed to war had come to enroll in R.O.T.C.
“It’s easy,” I said. I told him the story I’d made up about being charged with assault and battery, and his eyes seemed to clear like the desert air after a storm. “It isn’t true,” I added. “I could never hurt anyone intentionally.”
The Captain looked depressed for a moment. Then he chuckled like Skinner designing a new maze. “What if your sister were attacked?” he asked. “What if some pimp tried to mug or rape your sister and you were there?”
“I’d stop him,” I said. Morrisey smiled. Without even pausing to think, I said, “But I’d use force, not violence.”
“What the hell is the difference?” Morrisey inquired.
Force, I explained, lacked the intent to do physical or permanent harm to another person. Prevention, not cure. “Like having your teeth cleaned,” I said.
The strangest aspect of these tests of wit and wisdom was that I came to like Captain Morrisey. Genuinely. When Vietnam came up, he offered the defense of our country as a reason and instead of saying, “Whose country?” I rejoined with the tried but trite example of the Civil War and foreign interference. Neither of us won this endless game of dominoes. The second time Vietnam dragged its carcass into our conversation, Morrisey said that he had seen his best buddy blown away by a Claymore Mine. Having watched Pamela bleed to death, I understood what he meant well enough never to raise the gorgon of Southeast Asia again. Ultimately, Captain R.J. Morrisey decided that were I to go into the regular Army I’d serve out my tour in the brig being beaten and buggered by Marine guards. So he offered to do, and did, what seemed an act of courage beyond the call of duty: He wrote my draft board to explain that while I wasn’t always conscientious, I was by nature not violent and recommended that when the time came I be given a I-O deferment. Meanwhile, he suggested that I consider withdrawing from Rotsy, although “that wouldn’t mean we couldn’t get together for a beer from time to time.”
Before I could decide to withdraw, a dark little Major named Adjamien made the decision for me. Walking home alone from drill one day, I was trying to visualize a German sentence in the subjunctive. Finally, I gave that up and settled for conjugating the verb “fahren.” Adjamien passed me going in the opposite direction, his figure tilted forward as if into a high wind, his uniform weighted with the merit badges of ribbon and metal that the Army hands out for everything from excellent typing to heroism on the drill field. Having just reached “fahrt” in my conjugatory detachment, I failed to salute him.
“Cadet!” he shouted, his voice high and thin and airy. I turned and walked back to him, tactfully maintaining enough distance between us not to bend his facsimile of a neck. He looked familiar, like he was cousin to someone I knew. He stepped in close, raising himself on his tiptoes, and demanded to know why I had failed to salute him. The way the nose hairs stuck out from his upturned nostrils told me he would not appreciate a joke about having overlooked him because of his height; I couldn’t help grinning at the way height, in his case, meant absence and not presence.
“Just what do you think you’re laughing at?” Major Adjamien said. He spoke each word clearly, spitting them out. Droplets of his saliva made me blink.
“I wasn’t laughing,” I said, rubbing my eyes with the back of my hand. “I was thinking.”
Early in the semester, Max Rafferty had addressed a randy assembly of the college’s boys and described the Big Man on Campus. “The sort,” Max had said, “who has his thumb in every pie.” Had I known that Adjamien was a
Big Man on Campus, perhaps I would have refrained from explaining to him that I respected no one’s clothes.
That evening, a ghastly-looking fellow in a senior cadet’s uniform dropped by my room offering to fix things with the major, telling me in a lugubrious voice to call him “Sandy.”
“It’s the logic of muggers, Sandy,” I told him. I knew who He was; I’d seen Him too many times in too many disguises not to recognize Him. What the hell, Sandy was as good a name as any for Him.
“Muggers,” I said, “won’t mug people in fur coats or silk suits. They respect fur coats and silk suits second only to Cadillacs.”
“Now?” Sandy asked, knitting and unknitting his brows.
“No. Not now, either,” I said.
“Okay,” He said. “I still owe you one. But I have to warn you. Sooner or later you’re going to have to take it. I’m not gonna ask too many more times.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m going to take the best three out of two.”
“Oh,” He said, “I almost forgot. I promised to deliver this.” Digging through his backpack of fears and dreams, He pulled out a package in a plain brown wrapper. Inside was a carefully carved jewelry box, inlaid on the top with silver and lapis lazuli. Inside it were a singular brass wind chime that went “dong” when you struck it and a top-of-the-line Swiss Army knife—the kind you can use for everything from whittling to root canals.
I didn’t ask who had sent them. I didn’t have to. “How’d you find me?”
“Smell,” He said, grinning that grin of his.
“Smell?”
“Speed is like cheese,” He said. “You can smell the person who uses it the same way you can smell fear.” He punched me on the shoulder. “See ya around, Spike.”
It turned out that Max Rafferty had been right. Major Adjamien had his thumb in every pie, all of them filled with blackbirds—trained blackbirds that flew one by one over my head and bombarded me with their inherited wisdoms. While I bobbed and ducked, they took away my spats, my shiny helmet, my M-1—and (the bastards) my sense of belonging to something larger than my self.