by Gus Lee
Was I a killer? Mr. McWalter’s question would not go away.
And so I dreamed of Leo drinking his wine and dying. He would pop his suspenders and belch as the first waves of pain hit, and he would get sick. Or he would be bent over with gut pain, slapping the wood floor with his large hands, retching onto his Big Ben overalls, his big, ugly head down. He would hunt down Lucky with a knife. Lucky, his eye swollen, put his unschooled fists up to his father as he had put them up to me, six years before.
At the end, Leo would always cry, “China boy, you lame little streak a yella chink crap, why didn’t you call the po-lice?! I’m dyin’ in my gut an it’s your doin’! You had a phone!”
14
DUKE
West Point, November 1964
The winter gods smiled on me, shedding foo chi, good fortune. I moved to Corps Squad gymnastics training tables in the deep alcove in the center of Washington Hall. I was the worst high-bar man in college athletics, but I ate a nightly supper that would have filled the Trojan horse and the hulls of the Greek fleet. I squirreled food and distributed it to classmates.
“Damn, son,” said Fitz McBay, the Southern traditionalist table com. “You eat like a starvin’ potbellied pig!”
The presidential election consumed the front pages of The New York Times. Johnson ran on a platform of rationality and peace, and painted Senator Goldwater of Arizona as a militaristic warmonger. The President announced that he would not send “American boys to fight a war that ought to be fought by Asian boys.”
There were four other Asians in the Class of 1968.
“I guess,” I said to Mike Benjamin during the bonfire rally before the Navy game, “he’s just going to send me and the other four Asians to Vietnam, so you don’t have to go.”
“Mighty white of you,” said Arch Torres, a classmate from New Mexico who was a better boxer than I.
“Thanks, buddy!” said Bob Lorbus as he thumped me on my chest hard enough to evacuate my air, while Joey Rensler whacked my back, exclaiming, “Yeah, outstandin’!”
“Anytime,” I squeaked.
On November 3, Lyndon Johnson would defeat Barry Goldwater and remain in the White House. Robert Francis Kennedy would be elected senator from New York. Both would draw 90 percent of the black vote. I couldn’t vote, and I wasn’t black, but I felt I was part of it, even if I ended up being one of a tiny minority of Asian-American soldiers who were going to be sent to Vietnam so white boys wouldn’t have to go.
But the larger event, by far, in the historic month of November 1964 was the 74th Army-Navy Game in Veterans Memorial Stadium, Philadelphia. The Army team, three-touchdown underdogs, had defeated the highly touted Navy squad with stout defense and blitzes. Army’s Rollie Stichweh, the unsung star quarterback, had outplayed Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. The Corps, the Army team’s “twelfth man,” had willed victory through our demented screams led by Marco Matteo Fideli. It had helped that the team was rich in defensive talent and coached by Paul Dietzel, one of the country’s best coaches. Army had the tradition. Red Blaik had defined Army football of the twentieth century, and college football of the forties and fifties. Vince Lombardi had been an assistant coach, and now everyone was excited about a big, bluff line coach named Bill Parcells, whose brother was on the team.
The buses returned from Philadelphia on November 28, 1964, and the band played, chapel bells pealed, faculty and staff families honked car horns, and everyone, throats stripped raw from hours of screaming, once again sang “On Brave Old Army Team” as if it were the new national anthem. It felt as if we had won World War II, singing for all that was good, all our suffering as cadets redeemed by a game that represented so much more than a pigskin in fall.
I, a basketball player who had never mastered football, had become an uncompromising football fanatic. The season had absorbed our personas, suspended our cares. I answered Marco Fideli’s spirited cheers as if they were calls from Odin, the Norse high god, to whom Plebes prayed in long, haunting chants, for parade-canceling thunderstorms. I donated my yuing chi, my fortune, and my yeh, karma, to all the Scandinavian and Chinese gods. I offered my few good credits in return for first downs or enemy punts. Just let us get one touchdown here, on this drive, and I’ll expect nothing else of my life, I whispered amidst the roar of the Corps. The Army victory over Navy had been an answer to prayers, more significant than our march across the Plain to join our companies at the end of Beast. The victory in 1964 had ended Navy’s stunning ability, in six consecutive years, to hand talented Army teams bitter defeats in Philadelphia. The curse had ended, and we were to share in riches beyond measure.
Mr. Arvin had been named First Captain of the Corps, following in the long-striding footsteps of Robert E. Lee, John Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, and Pete Dawkins. “IN RECOGNITION OF ARMY’S DEFEAT OF NAVY,” he boomed from the Poop Deck, “MEMBERS OF THE FOURTH CLASS ARE GRANTED A FALL-OUT AT ALL MEALS, WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT, UNTIL RETURN OF THE CORPS FOLLOWING CHRISTMAS LEAVE!”
“CHEER, BOYS, CHEER!” shouted Fitz McBay. “There’s been nuthin’ like this since a days a Dawkins, Ca’penter, Hol’afield, Red Blaik, Blanchard an’ Davis, an’ the National Championships. Talk about yo’ West Point Good Deal! Y’all got it made!”
Pandemonium erupted as we screamed, reliving Champi’s TD catch from Stichweh, Nickerson’s kick, Staubach’s safety and his negative twenty-eight yards rushing. Plebes ate without bracing, and I would no longer have to spirit grub from the mess hall for starving classmates. Arvin was a god, a modern Hector or Diomedes.
And so we entered December, round with victory over ancient enemies and cheered by a dramatic drop in temperature that prefaced the arrival of Christmas. We were going home for Yuletide, the first Plebe Class ever to do so. This was my first eastern winter, the snowfall was light—and I had found a pool table, a modern version of a boy’s rock-throwing lake.
“I hear you’re famous,” said Duke Troth.
“You have me confused with someone else,” I said, chalking the cue and bending over the table. “Six ball, side pocket.”
I stroked it softly, the six falling into the hole, creating a sweet little drumroll as it followed the chute across the underside of the table into the tray. The cue ball rolled to the far rail slowly. Instead of caroming to give me shape and space on the three, it hugged the rail, producing a tough shot. “Hmm,” I said to myself. I was not happy to see Duke.
At Wedemeyer’s Billiards in the Tenderloin, Bennie Davis would say, “Play loose, don’t lose your cool.” He could make his play, double-banking a cushion-running ball, while a San Francisco quake shook the slate and his four ex-wives screamed at him for the rent.
We were in Nininger Hall, the generously described Fourth Class Club. Lieutenant Alexander R. Nininger, Class of 1941, was the first West Pointer to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II. He had died while fighting with the 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts. Nininger Hall was a long room on the third floor above the north sally port in Central Area. It had one small TV, an old pool table, bad lights, and an assembly of furniture that had been rejected by that other army—the Salvation. Nininger was more than sufficient entertainment for eight hundred men who spelled “recreation” with the letters S-L-E-E-P. Ten of us were in Nininger on a Sunday following chapel and before supper formation because of the halcyon days created by Army’s epic game. The rest were blissfully asleep in brown boys, the pedestrian-issue comforters which, along with being able to go to the bathroom without someone screaming at us, provided us our simple pleasures.
I had waited two hours for the table, memorizing the Days until my turn arrived. I was playing eight ball with Bill Reichert, the winner for the last five games. Bill had also been in Fourth New Cadet Company. I was playing well and was three balls behind.
“Three ball, corner pocket,” I said.
“Never make it,” said Troth.
I blew out air. “Your opinion don’t matter.” I stroked the cue ball, too hard—it
took too much off the three, which caromed off the left margin of the pocket and left the cue ball in fair shape for Bill’s fifteen. Sorry, Bennie Davis; I lost my cool. I dusted chalk dust from the apron.
“Tough shot,” said Bill, offering comfort.
“Someone said I wouldn’t make it, and I listened to him. Good luck on yours,” I said.
“Shit!” laughed Troth. “You society bitches playing bridge? ‘Good luck on yours,’ ” he mimicked. “You guys married?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was in all the papers.”
Duke Troth glared at me. He pulled down a pool cue as if it were a rifle from a gun rack. My heartbeat picked up. He reversed the cue stick, blunt end forward. But he didn’t move, staying out of my reach. I turned my cue around as well, holding it a shoulder width apart, and faced him, my heart pounding. “No wonder you’re no good in pool,” I said. “You’re holding it wrong.”
He barked a laugh. “I could fuckin’ kill your ass,” he hissed.
“All you could do,” I said, “is talk someone to death.”
“Screw you. Finish your game, geek. Then let’s talk.” He hurled the stick in the corner. My heart fluttered as the stick clattered against old wood and hollowly bounced on the floor.
Some classmates were playing chess and watching the tube, and they jumped. “Don’t be a jerk,” said one.
“Fuck you, asshole, in the ear,” replied Troth.
Bill lifted his eyebrows at me.
“Beats me,” I said quietly.
“You know he’s crazy,” said Bill.
“I figured.” My left quadricep had a small muscular quiver. Troth had to be crazy. Plebe year and the dominion of the upper classes left no room for intramural animosity. Everyone did his best for himself and for his classmates. Troth seemed outside the system, as if he were not a Plebe but a young lord in a nation of hoboes. My heart slugged with the possibility of fighting him. I shook my head. Plebes don’t fight each other. We could call out an upperclassman into the ring, but not each other. He had called me a “geek.” It sounded like “gook.”
I wondered how he got away with it. In Hell-One, my company, a BJ Plebe like Troth would be a shit magnet, drawing the ire of the upper classes like blasphemy in the Vatican.
“Fifteen in the corner,” said Bill, “eight in the side.” The music of sinking balls began, and I racked my pool cue.
Troth was reclined on the sofa, smoking. He had popped open the dress-gray winter jacket’s high black collar, which had a white, snap-on, starched cotton insert. Troth’s was worn black, obviously unchanged for days. His uniform and body were saturated in the stale, sour imprint of a chain-smoker. I thought: What do you want with me, you unwashed, dirtbag, bigoted, anti-Semitic pig?
“I hear you’re a celebrity yourself,” I said.
“Whaddya hear?” he asked, taking his gaze from the snow-shrouded window and the view of the steam grates to look up at me.
“I hear you sponge off small classmates.”
“Rumors! They’re a bitch. But it’s true, growing boys gotta eat. Why pick on flankers when you can snip runts?” He smiled with big teeth, his prominent nose aiming at me, his hard, muscular face shadowed by the hall’s old lights. Plebe year had placed accents into his features, making it look maliciously mature. Caesar.
“So talk.” I sat on one of those sofas not designed for sitting, and it resisted me.
Troth wasn’t going to fight. It would be insane to do it here, even with the delirium of the Navy game still thick in the air, like a rich, redolent cologne that clouded and powdered West Point’s severe Calvinism. Troth had a bad reputation; I didn’t. If we were to scrap, it’d be his neck, not mine.
He lit another cigarette and blew smoke rings at the window. He took pleasure from their little implosions against the cold, iron-runged glass, as if the smoke rings were little furry creatures that he enjoyed killing.
I tried to estimate the size of his arms beneath his tunic. I estimated effort in the ring by measuring the size of an opponent’s arms. Tony Barraza’s were huge, and all my life I’d tried to make mine look like his. Winter dress gray was made of a heavy and rough wool; it had taken all the hair off our legs. It was too thick for me to read Troth’s arms, but he clearly had not been hungry for a while, and he was not a Corps Squader.
“Contacts,” Troth said, smiling. He ran the thumb of his right hand across its fingertips, starting with the little finger and ending with the index, then running them back. It was a simple movement, but his leering smile made it seem sordid and uncleanly obscene.
“Contacts. The whole friggin’ world’s made of contacts. It ain’t what you know, it’s who you know. And who you know is based on what you can trade. Know what I mean? Learned in the Army: ‘Take command.’ ” He smiled, showing teeth. “I’m takin’ command.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You’re just an Oriental, but you got contacts. Bo Kleiner was a hero in the Navy game and is all-East, and he talks about you like you were an asshole buddy. You know the Fideli twins—the ones who confused the shit out of us during Beast—and they sing opera in New York during the summer, with their names in The New York Times. And Marco Fideli’s head Rabble Rouser and has adopted your ass. You run all over the goddamn Academy talkin’ to guys who were in your Beast company, listenin’ to their gripes and B-aches. I’m building a team, and everywhere I go I hear about some Oriental in glasses who got there first. Can you believe that crap?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“Aw, the hell you don’t! You eat it up, slidin’ around on your special ticket. Guys think you’re interesting. Okay, hotshot. I want to meet Kleiner and the Fidelis. I won’t forget it. I’ll help you when you need something. That’s what classmates are all about.”
“You’re nuts,” I said. “Plebes don’t introduce Plebes to upperclassmen like—like this was some sort of club. I can’t say, ‘Hi, sir, I want you to meet a buddy of mine.’ Look, Kleiner’s younger brother turned down the appointment I got. We talked once. The Fidelis—well, they got their reasons for picking me out. But it’s up to them, not us. You know that. You know all this stuff better than I do. You’re a poop schooler.”
I looked over at the table. Bill was playing Mike DiBenedetto, who was patiently waiting for Bill’s first miss. Both looked up at me, concerned. I was awed. That’s what classmates are for. I was instantly proud to know them, to be here. Here, my dreams of Leo Washington had evaporated. I was inside a castle, a fort, the Hanlin Academy. Here, people were encouraged to do the right thing. We had promised at the river to be good men.
“Okay,” Troth said in a low voice, bending toward me, his smoke curling around my face. “I’ll trade. How’d you like to have all your papers Times? Or get outa laundry duty? That’s beautiful—a fuckin’ Chinese guy not havin’ laundry detail! Is that chichi or not? I can’t do a thing about minute calling, or latrine warming. You’re on your own for those shit details.”
I looked at him, brows at work. “What are you talking about?” I was hearing his words, but they weren’t making sense. “We’re not even in the same regiment—we couldn’t swap duties.”
Cadet upperclassmen received two dailies—The New York Times and a good, obscure, and unpopular upstate paper. Plebe details gathered them from stoops before reveille and delivered them to the doors of the sleeping upperclassman. There were never enough copies of the Times, and there was hell to pay when a Firstie or a Cow, a junior, got the Gazette instead. Plebes divided the Times so the criticism could be distributed, producing optimum shared success under deficient circumstances. (I vowed, if I got through Plebe year, to be an upperclassman who would always ask for the Gazette.) In reality, of course, it wasn’t a big deal, but in a world when you can’t decide how or when to get up seven mornings a week, picking your newspaper became a Good Deal. How could Troth get only the Times? How could he trade duties like they were stocks?
“I’m not talkin’ about swappi
ng, douchebag! Damn, you’re dense! I’ll get knobs to do it for you! You don’t do a damn thing.”
“You’ll get knobs to do it? What the hell are you—a freakin’ upperclassman all of a sudden?” I asked.
“Keep your goddamn voice down!” he hissed.
“How the hell would you get your classmates to—? Oh, wow,” I said, getting it. He would get them to do his jobs like he got them to share their food: he used his fists—or pool cues. I twisted on the sofa, making it complain. “You’re unbelievable.”
“Pretty fuckin’ neat hat-trick, right?” he asked, punching me on my arm. He was only half through his smoke, but he discarded it and lit another, glinting at me through the haze. “Figured this out in the Army. At Sandhurst, the Brit academy, upperclassman got valets to take care of their shit, to pack their ditty bags and spit-shine their shoes. Now, that’s chichi. Haven’t gotten the goddamn system to work yet, but I will. Just a matter of contacts, building the team. You can help. The Fidelis, they can help.”
He ran his ice-cold gaze around the room. I studied him in amazement. He lowered his voice so much he almost croaked. “Whoever sticks with me now, I’ll remember later. Whoever pisses me off, I’m gonna butcher—tomorrow, maybe the day after, but the asshole’ll get it in the ear when he’s not looking. Let’s not shit around. The only reason I’m in this sucking, chickenshit place is to win.”
He was waiting. All I could do was stare. I kept looking at his uniform. I often wondered how I had managed to get into this exclusive White Men’s Club. How did he?
“I don’t want anything to do with you,” I said. I stood.
He leaned across the sofa. “Listen, Red Ryder,” he said, rasping. “You don’t get it. You don’t know what you’re missing. Don’t be dense. Don’t you know who I am? I could get you laid. This is your only chance, meathead! You’re not exactly model material. And they’re beautiful. How about that?”
I coughed. For a moment, the idea of actually having physical congress with a girl stopped the creaky little wheels in my brain. I remembered the Tenderloin pimps and the hard, unhappy, painted ladies of Turk Street, their dislike of boys who stared and had no cash or interest. They had terrible lives orchestrated by their managers. It was better to be rejected by Christine or to be a lifetime monk.