by Andre Dubus
“Okay, Danny Boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Skipper tells me he got confinement orders today on four Marines.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“I figured he wasn’t lying. He wants to know how come you locked ’em up.”
“Disorderly conduct, sir.”
“What did they do? Fart?”
“Well, sir, they were what you might call disorderly.”
Commander Craig took off his cap, scratched his scalp with the same hand that held the visor, then replaced it.
“Look here, Sonny Boy. I don’t give a shit what you do down there as long as the job gets done—savvy? I furthermore don’t give a shit if the Skipper don’t sleep at night. But I give a shit so big you couldn’t walk around it about my sleep, and Jesus Christ up there with the silver birds on his collar wants to know something before he goes nighty- night with his pecker in his hands, and I’m his Goddamn messenger boy. So let’s get this over with and I’ll get them birds off my back and go to bed.”
Dan was looking at some shapeless point on Commander Craig’s cap, and thinking that when a man was twenty-five years old he shouldn’t be sitting on a rear end which tingled as it had when he was a boy waiting for a spanking from his father.
“Well, sir,” he said, and now he was looking at Commander Craig’s lips which seemed little darker than his yellowish cheeks: “I guess I left off the specifications on purpose. It’s the first time I’ve been in charge of them, and I was embarrassed I guess—”
“Okay okay: why did you lock ’em up?”
“For silent contempt, sir.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly silent—I was giving a class and they were talking and I told ’em to knock it off and they—you know: kind of grinned and grab-assed a little—”
“I don’t want to hear all that crap. Why didn’t you put that on the confinement orders?”
“Because, sir, like I said, I was embarrassed and I didn’t want anybody to read about it—the Captain, the Legal Officer…”
“Jesus—little boys I got to fool with. All right: go on home now. I don’t know what the Skipper’ll think, but I know Goddamn well he ain’t going to like it.”
Dan said aye aye sir and good night sir and left, his body still waiting for that spanking. He was not at all relieved by the success of his lie; when he undressed in his room and hung his uniform in the wall locker he glanced down at the leather-encased Mameluke sword they had given him at Basic School and, feeling that he could never again be scornful of a cowardly officer, he got into his bunk and smoked two cigarettes in the dark before the relaxation of sleep began in his legs and spread upward until finally only a space in the top of his head was still functioning, telling again that doubly shameful lie to Commander Craig.
Next morning Ted Freeman woke in fright, his body tensing and his heart pounding until he connected the voice and loud banging of wood on steel with the turnkey, who was moving up and down in front of the cells, striking the flat-barred doors—steel grating, really—with his nightstick and shouting: “Reveille! Reveille! Outa the sacks, prisoners—” Ted got up quickly, turning his back to the door to protect his eyes from the fluorescent light of the white passageway. He knew that it was five-thirty, that if he were standing in the hangar bay three decks above him, or on the flight deck high above that, he could see only the pale beginnings of dawn.
Thinking of heights of decks and compartments above and below the brig made him realize, too suddenly, that he was trapped inside a huge structure of steel and machinery which was floating on inconceivable depths of water, and that if something happened, a collision with another ship, for instance (there might be thick fog topside, or a blinding storm: he had no more idea than he would if he were in a grave), or if there was a fire in the hangar bay, with all that jet fuel the airdales dripped on the decks, and those planes loaded with bombs: if anything like that happened he would be solely in the hands of this turnkey whom he knew to be as young and uncertain as he was. It would be the turnkey who would have to keep his head and unlock the cell and get him and the others up the ladders, to the fantail where he could at least see the sky while he waited for a lifeboat in the charge of some petty officer or officer he did not even know. He bent over and folded his rubber mattress at the middle. There was no bunk: only the mattress and a mattress cover, without sheets or pillow; he had one blanket and now he neatly folded that and placed it squarely atop the mattress. Then he put on his utilities and boots and sat on the mattress.
His fear at being trapped had already passed, as if his mind had discarded it for a more important trouble. Ted was thinking that on this same deck but about three hundred feet forward, the rest of the Detachment were sleeping and would be for another hour. In the darkened berthing area, they lay motionless under blankets so it seemed that it was not only the man but the entire bunk which breathed or snored. They lay sleeping just as they would if he were there in his bunk. When reveille sounded they would get up: some quickly, from disciplined habit which he admired; others lying there for a few minutes, then groaning and pushing away the blankets and dropping to the deck, landing on unprepared feet and ankles. They would put on shower shoes and walk slowly to the head—though, as with quick bunk-departers, there were always those who went briskly to the head, got the faucets and mirrors first, and already had lathered their faces and begun to shave by the time more normal people filed in. But one thing held true for everyone: there was little talking. They would start their day like that, spending the rest of it doing their ordered tasks, just as they would if he were still following Captain Howard about the ship. Those fifty-one Marines, including Burns, would go through this day just as they would if he were dead.
He rose from the mattress and went to the door. Both hungry and thirsty, his throat dry from sleeping open- mouthed, he asked permission to speak, then told the turnkey he would like to eat, with the same expectancy he might have had if he were requesting a vaccination; for he was thinking of cold orange juice in a tall glass and hot- cakes and bacon and eggs all on one mess tray, the yolk moving thickly toward the edge of the stacked hotcakes, squares of butter melting within and on top of the stack, as he ate the eggs and some of the bacon, then sopped up the yolk with one of the hotcakes before covering the rest with maple syrup and following each sweet-dripping bite with a long swallow of cold milk; then hot black coffee and a cigarette. The turnkey handed him an unsliced loaf of bread, an aluminum pitcher of water, and a thick white glass mug, then locked the door again.
Ted sat on the mattress, the loaf of bread in his lap. It was from the ship’s bakery, which was located directly above the Marine barracks. The Detachment had befriended the bakers; it had been easy to do, for sailors apparently liked being adopted by Marines, being treated as a special clique of sailors which was spared the general scorn for the Navy. In return, some Marine came down the barracks ladder every day with a couple of hot just- buttered unsliced loaves of bread: he would drop them on a table and the troops would crowd around it, burning their fingers as they gouged large hunks from the loaves. The loaf Ted held on his lap was not stale, but it was cool and unbuttered.
He drank some of the water, quivering in slightly nauseated recoil as he felt it course downward and spread in his stomach. On his bitter morning palate the water was foul, and he set the pitcher on the deck thinking of cold juices: orange, apple, grape, even grapefruit, even tomato. He thought of those oranges so abundant in chow halls that on some days you ignored them, did not even see them, and on other days you peeled one and ate it on your way to the barracks (in his mind this barracks was in the sun and on the land of Sea School: bright casual days when he had never seen the inside of a brig); or you stuck one in your pocket, then put it in your wall locker to eat later. Oranges were what you got in Christmas stockings at grade school parties, and in your own stocking at home because they filled it so well for so little money. If he had one now, h
e thought, he would not even have the patience to peel it: he would bite through the skin and suck its juice.
He carried the bread, three-quarters uneaten, and the pitcher of water to the door and waited until the turnkey returned from one end of the passageway, opened his door, and took them. He was grateful for one thing: he had not had enough of a breakfast to make him want a cigarette.
There were five sailors in the brig and they had been moved into the last two cells, clearing the first four so each of the bread-and-water prisoners would have a cell to himself. The sailors were in the passageway now, standing rigidly in column; then a chaser came down the ladder and took them up to a sponson deck for calisthenics. From there they would go to the chow hall, then to some part of the ship which they would clean.
Ted sat on the mattress again. He was not hungry anymore, and he did not want to smoke: with a sense of fresh strength he knew he could live the next two days of his life without good food and cigarettes. He did not feel trapped either: as confidently as someone planning a holiday, he knew the Vanguard would not sink or catch fire while he was in the brig. And he wasn’t concerned about the Detachment going obliviously through their day, talking about him—if at all—in the hardened tones of survivors, of young men who said and wanted to mean it: Semper Fi means bring up the ladder, boys—I’m aboard.
He could live two days or the rest of his life with that knowledge too.
Rising from the folded mattress he went to one bulkhead, then the other: Hahn was in the cell to his left, Jensen to his right, but he could not hear them; then he realized that what he had listened for was some sound of suffering. He thought of Hahn hanging himself with his web belt from one of the steel I beams overhead. But with as much rage at another human being as he could feel right then—which was not much—he assumed that Hahn was standing in his cell, glaring out at the turnkey like a caged panther.
That brought him to his final awareness and he had to sit down again, for he could not bear it: the only person in the world who loved him without qualification was Jan and she was farther away than ever now, in more trouble than ever now, while he was locked up between two people like Hahn and Jensen—Ted Freeman, whom he had known all his life as a good boy, rarely punished at home or school, never even questioned by so much as a traffic cop, a good boy who had always been a target for abuse, as though after the first bully got to him he had gone through boyhood with a mark that offended even the least sadistic and made them kick him for what he was. He had tried to please teachers without alienating classmates, so that his grades in high school were repetitions of C’s which for happier students meant Casual but for him meant Conformity; he had tried to please his contemporaries, had cursed and drunk beer and smoked and gossipped about lost cherries when they did, had refrained when they did, had feverishly changed loyalties, tastes, clothes, haircuts as soon as—from his customary distance—he had a chance to see the shifting weathervanes of the crowd. Above all, he had been good. Of course he could do nothing else: he had never had the social power to be unkind any more than he had had the physical power to be a bully; he had never been able to bewitch one of those ostensibly hesitant and fearful and innocent girls, to return to the boys with his trophy-stained car seat. He was conscious of that too. But the point was, he had been good.
And now, for all that and nothing more, he sat in a cell between two of the dirtiest, most heartless boys he had ever known, and in the cell past Jensen’s was McKittrick whose very name brought the nausea of revulsion to his stomach: a hatred of something base, of something terribly weaker than any weakness Ted had ever been accused of. He had gone before the Lieutenant as one of them, his name had been recorded in the Unit Punishment Book along with theirs, he had gone to sick bay, standing naked beside them, with no way at all to explain to Doctor Butler that he was different.
Suddenly his heart quickened. He stood up, his fastest motion of the day, remembering when the chaser took them to sick bay and Doctor Butler had come in, looking stern: but when he saw Ted he had been surprised. Ted had seen it in his eyes, and the Doctor had paused in front of him and said gently:
“What are you doing here again, Freeman?”
“Sir disorderly conduct sir.”
Doctor Butler had gone over to the corpsman’s desk and looked at the confinement papers, then turned again, his face a little puzzled and stern too now, but his voice still the same:
“It doesn’t say what you did.”
Ted was trying to think of an answer but Hahn did it for him.
“Sir we were kind of fighting sir.”
Doctor Butler had looked at Hahn for a second or two, then told the corpsman to start the physical. He had not spoken to Ted again.
But he had known. It was as plain in his face as the look of surprise and disappointment in that civics teacher’s face—Mr. Gary—when he had caught Ted passing his test paper to Karl Lutring so he could copy it.
Ted went to the steel grating door and looked at the turnkey sitting on a high stool at a podium four feet away. The turnkey was writing in his log; then he glanced up, saw Ted’s face, and asked what he wanted.
“Sir nothing sir.”
He returned to the mattress. He had to work out the process, remember the recourses he had heard about but had never used: request mast, evasiveness while talking to those who stood, by rank, between you and the man you wanted to see; he considered the sea-lawyer part of it too: his rank taken away without even the chance to tell his side of the story—the whole story—and without being warned under Article Thirty-one; the Lieutenant throwing him against the bulkhead (but when he thought of telling Doctor Butler that, he was ashamed: he would let that one go). He would tell the rest, though, all of it—
Then he began to see a new hope, a chance not only to leave the brig and those three completely rotten people he did not deserve to be with, but a chance to win back everything he had been screwed out of: his unit punishment sheet taken out of the file and destroyed, the offense he had not committed crossed out of his record book, his rank restored, and a clean record with a shot at corporal when Captain Schneider got back. He would request mast with Captain Schneider too, just to make sure his slate was clean so he would be considered for promotion when he became eligible in March.
Now March itself took on a new sound. He saw himself hurrying down the packed after-brow from the ship to the Alameda pier, Jan having pushed forward to wait for him at the foot of the brow, and on his green sleeves not the single red chevron of a Pfc but the two chevrons of a corporal: an NCO, a man of rank and a man with a future too. His mind skipped backward to the Sunday afternoons aboard ship when Burns had taken him into the Detachment office and shown him some of the things you had to know to be a clerk: Ted had sat there learning about filing systems, a bit shameful of this secret initiation into a soft military specialty, but over the shame he had experienced a sense of confidence which was always absent when he worked on his correspondence course in squad tactics, bent over the usual drawing of a hill with one treeline going up to its flank, knowing the problem called for a single envelopment, but thinking of how it really was, removed from the relative comfort of a ship: unable to see himself as a corporal telling one fire team to lay a base of fire while he led the other two fire teams up that treeline to assault the hill. Burns had said the Detachment could send him to clerk-typist school when his sea tour was over, and after the school he’d go somewhere as a company clerk: the right-hand man of the First Sergeant and XO and CO, going out to the field only when there were big exercises and the whole company went out; it didn’t matter how much the guys harassed you for not being a crunchy, you still had the best of all jobs. It was a good field for promotion too, and though he, Burns, was not staying in the Corps, if he were he’d stick it out as an admin man—
With all these reversals, victories, seeming to rush through his very blood and heart, Ted rose again from the mattress, went to the door, asked the turnkey for permission to speak, then sai
d he wanted to request mast with the ship’s Medical Officer. The turnkey was the first in the chain of command to ask him why.
“Sir personal reasons sir,” he replied, with nuances of anger and determination in his voice, surprising even himself. As the turnkey phoned the Detachment and told the assistant brig warden, a corporal, Ted thought—without defining whom he was referring to and in how many ways—Semper Fi: fuck ’em all.
It took the rest of the day, whose intervals he spent wanting a cigarette and pacing his cell except when he paused for more bread and water, to see everyone: a succession of increasing ranks, beginning with the assistant brig warden who came to his cell; then the brig warden, a second-hitch corporal soon to be a sergeant, who also came to his cell; the First Sergeant, and for that he was taken by chaser to the barracks; and finally, toward evening whose approach he knew from waiting, having surrendered his watch upon confinement so that he measured time by the relief and posting of a turnkey every four hours, he saw the Lieutenant. This trip also involved a chaser-escorted march to the barracks, his eyes feigning obliviousness of the passing men he saw more clearly than he ever had before: sailors who smirked or stared, some of them fearfully as if they were guilty of undetected offenses, and the Naval officers who glanced sternly at him, officers he hated; but, even more, he hated being a prisoner, forbidden to salute them.
So he did not see Doctor Butler until early that night, after the evening meal, and by then he was tired. Or at least his body was. All day long his only communication had been to repeat the request, then his answer to their inevitable question: Sir personal reasons sir. By the time he entered Doctor Butler’s office he was as ready to talk as he had been that morning.