by Gus Lee
“Tell me,” I said. “You enjoy pimping?” I left.
“You fuckin’ jerk! You’re walking away from a Good Deal! Fuck you in the ear! You’re gonna get it in the ass! I’m not gonna forget you. Keep your fuckin’ slant eyes open, asshole!”
I walked back to him, my adrenal system pumping fear and rage. After all of the pent-up repressions of Plebe year, to have this guy slap me in the face… “Stand up,” I said.
“Fuck off,” he growled.
“Park it and get up! Piss me off. Pickin’ on little guys. You’d better stand—it’s gonna hurt more sitting there than doing it.” I wasn’t a fighter, nor someone who even started fights. But I couldn’t turn my back on a guy who said I’d get it when I wasn’t looking. I’d rather fight than wait for it.
“He’s not worth it,” said Bill. “C’mon! They’ll kick a Plebe out for something like this.” He grabbed my arm and I threw him off, recovering my stance, left leg leading, left profile up.
What system—boxing from Tony Barraza or Chinese wing chun gong fu from Pinoy Punsalong? My muscles were taut, accumulating energy for release. I’d use both: right leg-front kick to groin, to chin as it came down; right cross to the head; lefts, rights, left hooks to the temples; full hip. If he was still standing after that, I’d improvise. I liked it. I wanted it. Yes, I said, showing teeth, deepening my stance.
“Kai—knock it off, man!” urged Mike D. “You’re gonna get in a shitload of trouble.”
“I got trouble if I don’t dunce him, right now.”
Troth was looking around, looking for space, getting ready to get up, the rodent in him scurrying for the guts to take a bite out of the cat before the lights went out.
The Plebes in Nininger were up, a few of them clearing the hall so they would not be part of the investigation that would follow a fight between Plebes. Rapid, fading footfalls echoed down the narrow staircase. I edged closer.
“Cool it right now!” shouted someone.
“Okay, okay! Asshole,” hissed Troth, baring his teeth and leaning back. “Take a freakin’ joke. You’re fuckin’ crazy. I’m not gonna screw with you.”
“Then stay away from me. And don’t play pool,” I added, flushed with victory. “And stay away from my friends.” And leave town before sunset, I wanted to say.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know who your friends are?!”
“They don’t like you,” I said.
I returned to barracks, my neck in, sloshing through the snow.
Why had I done that? Was I too thin-skinned, too sensitive about being what I felt deep down—a misfit, a yellow-colored man who ate too much while awaiting final rejection? I was surprised by how much anger I had in me. This was the second time I had offered to fight him over words. I wondered what my friends would have done. Toos wouldn’t have suffered Troth’s insults. Jack Peeve wouldn’t have, either.
“Tony,” I said, “this toad said I’d get it in the butt. So I called him out, in a place where we’re not supposed to fight. Did I do the right thing?” I saw Tony Barraza’s big head. He’d say, “Kid, what choice ya got?” I remembered Bill’s and Mike’s faces, afraid I had gone crazy. It was the look of my father.
As I entered barracks, Mr. Kunselman, the Yearling CQ, in charge of quarters, stopped me. “Ting, you have a visitor at Grant Hall. You’re authorized to go before supper formation.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I walked into Grant, mystified. Who would visit me? I knew no one who might drop in unannounced. I scanned the hall, the severe generals gazing back. There, under Marshall’s portrait, was a familiar face.
“Jack!” I cried. “Good God, Jack Peeve! God, I was just thinking about you!”
We shook hands vigorously, grinning and then laughing as he clapped me on the back and I beat on his big arms. He was dressed in a navy pea jacket, hadn’t shaved for several days, and smelled like an old truck. He looked like a man, and not a college student.
“How’d you get here?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I could’ve arranged something.”
“Hitchhiked,” he said. “Why call? Wasn’t sure I was gonna make it.” He laughed. “Damned big country!”
I marveled at him. He had just thumbed his way across the United States. Jack and I used to hitchhike around San Francisco. The City was seven by seven miles square.
I couldn’t stop smiling. “How long did it take?”
“Nine days. One guy got lost, took me too far south. Hey, you got any food? I’m outa dough. Haven’t eaten in a couple days.”
“Wait right here!” I yelled. “Don’t move.”
I sprinted back to barracks and asked for Bestier’s advice and Mr. Kunselman’s help. I filled my overcoat and ran back to Grant.
“First,” I said, “shave. God, you have so much hair … here’s the latrine. Gotta cut your hair. I can take you to the gymnastics table. You can eat like a horse. Pretend to be a cadet. I brought a uniform of a Yearling who’s going to help you out. My Honor rep says it’s a prank. If we get caught, they’ll skin me, but probably won’t kick me out.” He lathered and started shaving.
“Jack, being a cadet is like being in a different country. I’m just figuring it out. Shave faster! I gotta make formation. Enter the mess hall with the hockey team and find table sixteen in the Corps Squad alcove. Walk tall, military. Here’s a map of your route, the door, the alcove, and the tables. The hockey team will come singly, here … merge with them, here,” I said pointing.
“God, I have so much to teach you. Lotta people here are pissed and silent. It’s a hard place. Don’t say anything! Grunt and nod like you’re in The Guns of Navarone, in German-occupied Greece, and you don’t speak any of the languages.”
“You mean like you?” he asked.
I laughed with him. “Yeah. You open your trap, they’ll know you don’t fit in, and we’re dead.”
“Dang,” said Fitz McBay. “Who cut yo’ hair?”
Jack and I ate like we had been raised at the same trough. He shrugged his shoulders in a tight-fitting dress-gray tunic.
“Mranghl,” he said, chewing fast.
“Mah feelin’s exactly,” said Mr. McBay. “You a floater?” A floater’s team table had filled, and he “floated” for a seat.
Jack wasn’t under the Honor Code. He nodded.
“Big talker, huh?” asked Fitz.
Jack shook his head, grunted, and downed his milk. I poured him another.
“You’re going to eat more than Ting,” said Jake Kimure, team captain, fascinated with a cadet he had never laid eyes upon before.
“Hmm-mm,” said Jack.
“You know, there may be nothin’ ruder than a Yearlin’ Corps Squad floater,” said Fitz.
“Got that right,” said Jack in his thick, heavy speech, ending the conversation with a confident and baleful stare.
“How you getting back to the City?” We were in the lobby of the USMA Library. I had showed him as much of the Academy as I could. He had really liked the museum in Thayer. Hall had studied Goering’s baton, Yamashita’s sword, Mussolini’s little black cap, Robert E. Lee’s sash, and Stilwell’s campaign hat and diary.
“Same way,” he said. He stretched his thick neck and belched.
“Jack, you’re staying in the Thayer Hotel. I could try to sneak you into barracks, but it’s too risky.”
He shook his head. “I don’t take charity,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the truck park, or in the library.”
“Can’t, Jack.” I crammed some money into his pocket. “Think of how many clothes you handed down to me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Worth, altogether, at least five bucks.”
“Man, it was worth a million to me. Don’t fight. Just take it. You sleep anywhere else at West Point, you’ll get me in trouble.”
He nodded. “Okay. Just wanted to see the place. You like it?”
“Better than being at home.” I felt a spark of guilt. Jack had also wanted to
come to West Point. Somehow, this generous, powerful athlete had not made it, and I, the Chinese kid, had.
“I wish you were here with me, Jack.”
He shrugged his shoulders. There was an uncomfortable silence.
I broke it by explaining the incident with Duke Troth. “Was I wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, crap, the asshole’s a jerk. You went easy on ’im!”
“What would you have done?”
He grinned. How I envied that expression, brimming with deep emotional self-assurance. Duke wouldn’t consider crossing a guy with a smile like that. When I was a kid, I used to imitate Burt Lancaster’s gleaming smile, but I convinced no one while worrying others. As a boy, I had wanted to be a tough, unshaven, silently dangerous man, as tough as Hector Pueblo and Tony Barraza.
“I woulda said,” said Jack, “ ‘If I light this cue stick on fire, will you make it disappear up your ass? Now duck-walk outa here, buttface!’ ”
I laughed. “That’s Keats, isn’t it?”
He laughed. “Kai.”
“Yeah, Jack?”
“I woulda hated it here.”
15
MOCKINGBIRD
English 101B, February 1965
The Mighty Nine stone warriors in the Academic Board Room did not blink when the synchronized second hand of the boardroom chronometer struck twelve. Along the broad and brightly lit wainscoted corridors on three floors of Thayer, in Washington, and the old wooden halls of Bartlett, uniformed faculty in neatly pressed greens entered their section rooms.
“Section, Atten-HUT!” shouted section leaders throughout the Academy’s classrooms. The ten of us in English Section 2 sprang to attention, eyes ahead, shoulders back, heels together, feet at forty-five degrees. We did not have to brace, which made us feel practically nonchalant.
“Sir, the section is present and accounted for,” announced Deke Schibsted. We looked like hell. Ravine Mankoff was green and nauseous from drowning under Mr. Flauck’s watchful gaze; Curve Wrecker Glick and Spoon DeVries had boxing nosebleeds. My head was abraded from wrestling-mat burns and Robert Thought “Pensive” Hamblin wobbled, recovering from gymnastic apparatus falls. Only Jackson Flynn “Hawk” Latimer, the basketball player, seemed sound.
Section 2 was near the top of the class, and Deke was the number-one cadet in the section. We were periodically resectioned based on cumulative, daily grading. Mike Benjamin was number one in Section I—first in the class in English. Joey Rensler was at the bottom of the class, and Clint Bestier was right next to him.
“Take seats,” said Captain MacPellsin. Most of the faculty were youthful and tall, but Captain Mac was middle-aged and had successfully copied Mickey Rooney’s height. Many were handsome; our professor displayed the face of Uriah Heep, the ears of Jughead, and the hair of Harpo Marx. Mesmerizingly, he also spoke with Laurence Olivier’s British-accented voice. On his upper right sleeve he wore the World War II unit patch that my father had worn: the China-Burma-India theater. I felt a familial connection between us, silent but tangible, always wanting my teachers to like me.
His intensely pale face was highlighted by dark, age-lined eyes which were earnest in speech and ironic while listening. The disorganized light gray hair that rose from the top of his head was evidence of the riot of rich thought I imagined lay below. While seated, he seemed ghostlike and unearthly, a sepia-toned still life that could have been painted by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, USMA Class of 1855. I thought, Whistler’s Lit Professor.
Captain Mac taught Fourth Class English, focusing upon logic, ethics, aesthetics, and expression. He was respectful of poetry and committed to argument. Between defeating the Axis powers and holding the Reds at bay, Captain Mac had earned a master’s in English lit from Columbia. Like all good teachers, he brought all that he was into his lessons.
I enjoyed the lessons more than I did his authors. The Academy was enamored of Faulkner, who, late in life, had visited West Point to read from The Reivers. He offered the English department a touch of panache in a traditional school of well-oiled slide rules and room-filling, worship-seeking, card-reading analog computers.
Captain Mac never inspected our shoes, our belt buckles, the knots in our black ties, or the press in our charcoal class shirts while we stood to attention in his section, as was the habit of many math professors. Captain Mac petitioned us to push what he called the “outer edge of the envelopes of our beings. Thinking, gentlemen, may not be enough in this section.” That filled us with nagging fear. What the hell else was there?
Captain Mac’s essay topics went to the heart, and sometimes the buttocks, of the Academy experience. “Pros and Cons of Hazing: Evaluating the Fourth Class System,” required us to translate our social woes into essay. I wondered: could a heretic critique the Inquisition—and still get a good grade?
I couldn’t believe my own answer. The system that starved, shocked, and shackled me was “a worthy exercise for young men in which the desire to belong is implacably tested. The pride and belief produced by commonly enduring the stresses and toils of such a system may be unique in modern American education. As a consequence of this experience, cadets are prepared to aid each other to an unusual degree, a condition common to few schools. Hardship creates bonds. This truth can only be of benefit to the National Security.”
“I just wrote an essay in support of hazing.”
My roommates looked at me. Joey smiled. “Bang yur stupid crot neck in an’ gimme fifty push-ups an’ de Days, smack-head.”
“The Arguments Pro and Con: Submission of Cadet Grades to Parents” drew strong negative responses from the section. “We are either adults, prepared to defend the Nation, or not,” I wrote.
The essay “Should Toleration of Cheating Be the Equal of Cheating Itself?” was the most difficult for me. The Honor Code invoked strict liability; a slight infraction brought the most horrific penalty: expulsion from the Corps under the most painful conditions. A cadet Honor Board took evidence. You would be called into the boardroom in a midnight hearing to face a sword. If the hilt was offered, you were innocent—a grade far above “not guilty.” If you faced the sword point, you were dishonorably separated from the Corps, and cadets could not, ever after, speak of you. If found on honor by the Honor Board but reinstated by a successful officers’ appeal, no cadets could speak to you during cadetship and for all time, unto death. You would be “silenced,” sentenced to live without relationships—a lifetime curse imposed by the school in the mountains and the clouds.
Uncle Shim had told me that this system existed in China. “The worst punishment on earth, Hausheng, is k’ung hsu, to be ignored and socially abandoned. A person without gahng and lun, bonds and relationships to others, is a living ghost, unworthy of life.”
I had been raised under the rules of Draco and was opposed to his culture, but I wrote, “A failure to attack cheating is as reprehensible as the original crime by the first offender.”
Captain Mac wrote: “What if the original offender is your best friend?” Smugly, I wrote above his comment in large capitals, “MY FRIENDS WOULDN’T CHEAT.”
It was the topic “Should Chapel Be Mandatory at West Point?” that taught me that emotions were part of life. I hated chapel but was afraid to give an honest answer; this was about the white Christian God, and his house, and could involve any number of consequences. Superstitious fear tugged at my heart. I wrote a cowardly essay in support of mandatory chapel. I realized that if I turned it in, it could be a breach of the Honor Code. I tried again, savaging the system with a fervor that reminded me of Edna’s antichurch beliefs. It was hysterical. Again I rewrote it, arguing for abolishment with a logical, clinical objectivity appropriate, I thought, to my dignified maturity.
“Mr. Ting?” called Captain Mac in his refined English accent. I stood at attention before his table, where he sat at the head of a U-shaped array of cadet desks and flanked by the chalkboard walls. There we performed individual recitations, for grades, every day, acting out S
ylvanus Thayer’s vision of rampant scholasticism.
“Are you in favor of abolishing mandatory chapel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I disagree. You dedicate six pages in support, three against. I am influenced by the fact that you conclude with the argument against, but I found your reasoning for to be more compelling. Please explain the ambiguity.”
“Sir, I—I felt a—conflict in writing this essay.”
“Mr. Ting, it is my statement to that effect that brought you before my desk. I am not asking you to restate my inquiry. Please answer my questions.” Captain Mac’s wide face was wrinkled from brow to chin. His crow’s-footed eyes had squinted for years, having seen the China that I had not. He slowly rolled his spare, square shoulders—a sign, I thought, of impatience.
“Sir—I—hate mandatory chapel. In my first try, I came out for it, thinking it was the approved solution. Then I realized it could have been an Honor violation. In my second try, I attacked mandatory chapel, and got sort of emotional. In my third try, I corrected that, trying to be more—reasonable, sir.”
“Yes, Mr. Ting. By all means let us not be emotional. Emotion might spring from passion, and passion from conviction. And we cannot have that, can we?” He looked at me.
I thought of the Academy motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.”
“Sir, we operate from conviction.”
“Good. Take your seat, Mr. Ting.” He stood.
“Gentlemen. I expect you to push the outer edge of the envelopes of your beings. I have stated that thinking may not be enough in this section room. The question is clear: What else is there, besides thinking, for future officers of the United States Army?” He looked around the U.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Ting. I believe you did not have your hand up. Give us your thoughts about what else there might be.”