“You’ve got it figured good, Poteete. Hell, I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do after graduation and I’m a senior. You’ve got two fine jobs just waiting for you. You’ve got it made, man. You’ve got everything going for you.”
“I’ve got nothing going for me,” he said. “I don’t have a single thing going for me. When I left home, my daddy told me that I’d better finish the first year. He didn’t care if I quit the Institute after I proved I was man enough to go through the plebe system. I can’t even take it for two weeks.”
“There are other companies in the Corps, Poteete. Lots of other companies. They can transfer you down to first battalion tonight. I promise. Not all the companies are like R Company. There are some companies that don’t give a shit about anything. Man, it’s easy living up in ‘Gentlemen First,’ Poteete. Knobs up there think they’ve died and gone to heaven.”
Poteete turned and studied me carefully. Except for the trembling, I was motionless beside the column.
“Do you know that most of my classmates think you’re really fucked up, Mr. McLean?” Poteete said.
“A lot of my classmates think that I’m really fucked up,” I answered.
“They think you’re fucked up because you’re nice to them and don’t scream at them and don’t make them do pushups. What kind of school is it when you hate somebody who doesn’t scream at you?”
“You don’t understand this school yet, Poteete? America is in short supply of assholes so it needs military schools like this to replenish the ranks. But the place is getting better. I swear it is. You still have your Snipeses. But you’ll always have bastards like that. When I was a knob they had guys that would parboil newborn babies for sport. There was a supply sergeant my freshman year who got his kicks by tying little hamsters to parachutes made out of handkerchiefs. Then he would come up to the fourth division here and throw the hamster high up in the air. The hamster would go up about one hundred fifty feet, then drop down about eighty feet before the parachute would pop open and the hamster would land safely on the quadrangle. Two guys on the cadre would be waiting on the quad and they would stomp the hamster to death with their boots if it made a safe landing. But the real sport—and why the supply sergeant loved it so much—was when there was a malfunction in the little parachute and one of them wouldn’t open and the hamster would fall all the way, with the whole battalion screaming it down.”
“Will they scream me down?” Poteete asked coldly. His voice had gone beyond emotion, into a place beyond redemption.
“Poteete, no one wants you to jump. There’s not a single person in this barracks who wouldn’t do anything to see you come back over the rail. Not a single one. You made the mistake I did when I was a knob. You took it seriously. You didn’t treat it as a game.”
“I don’t like the game, Will. It seems too serious. Some of the cadre meant everything they said to me. Some of them hate me because I’m fat and ugly and don’t look good in the stinking uniform. I thought I could make it. I thought I was doing better until they took me to the house.”
“What house?” I asked.
“You know what house,” he said sharply. “The one where they take freshmen.”
“You mean to someone’s room?”
“I couldn’t stand what they were doing to me. They treated me worse than if I was an animal.”
“What house, Poteete? What are you talking about?”
In the shadows behind Poteete I saw the almost imperceptible movements of someone coming slowly along the rail, moving with infinite patience, silent as a lynx. Instantly, I looked away and pointed to a spot on the quadrangle.
“I spent the worst year of my life right there, Poteete, not too far from where you stand, in second platoon. I thought the year would never end. I thought it would last forever. Then when it was over, I thought it was the quickest year I had ever spent in my life. I learned something about time that year and how it works and what it means. Nothing lasts, Poteete. Whatever made you go over the rail tonight won’t last either.”
“I’m not going back with them.”
“Who, Poteete?”
“I don’t know who, McLean. Goddam, I don’t know anything. But I can feel them watching me. I know some of them are down there and I can feel their hatred. Do you know what else I feel? I can feel my father’s eyes watching me. I can hear him calling me a baby. I can hear my mother and father arguing about me. Him blaming her. Her blaming him. Who spoiled me? Who ruined me? Who did this and who did that? Who did too much and who didn’t do enough? Whose side of the family I take after? What went wrong?”
“Your parents would both want you inside the rail.”
“I can’t now.”
The barracks were silent. Stars spoke the language of light years, mutely, dimly above the barracks. Stars, arches, stone, cadre, Poteete, me, and death. I struggled for the right words, the life-preserving words to leap from my tongue. I was nauseated; I was afraid. The figure in the shadow moved inexorably toward us. I followed his progress peripherally. When he was ten feet away, I saw that it was Pig. Behind him, keeping to the shadow of the arches, crept Mark.
“Why, Poteete? All you’ve got to do is come over the rail. Just give me your hand and I’ll help you.”
“They’ll laugh at me if I don’t jump. They think I’m a pussy because I cry easily. I’ve got to prove to them that I have courage, too.”
“That’s nonsense. That’s bullshit, Poteete. You let them feed you with all that bullshit and you bought it all,” I said, sweeping my hand around the barracks in a gesture of disgust. “None of this makes any difference at all.”
“It makes a difference to me,” he shouted back. “There’s no way out of this, Will. There’s no way out of this with honor. Think of an honorable way for me to come back over the rail and I’ll do it.”
“This has nothing to do with being brave or manly or honorable or anything. This has everything to do with being human and being scared and having your world turned upside down and being humiliated. This has everything to do with your being better than us, Poteete. You can’t endure the life in the barracks because you are infinitely superior to all of us.”
“I’m afraid,” Poteete said. “I’ve been afraid ever since I came here.”
“All the freshmen are afraid. They’re supposed to be afraid. They’re supposed to be afraid out of their minds.”
“I’m that afraid, Will,” he said. “I’m scared out of my mind. Tell me how to get out of this, Will. I want to walk away from this. But I want to do it honorably. I don’t want them screaming at me or laughing at me.”
“Pig, Mark, and I will walk you out of the barracks, Poteete. If anyone laughs I’ll set my roommates on them. They’ll want to help you. I promise that. We’ll get you out of here. I’ll get the Bear to telephone your father and say you’re getting expelled from school for beating the hell out of half the cadre the first week and the other half the second week. We’ll tell him you broke the first sergeant’s jaw. That you’re too goddam tough to live in the barracks, that they ought to buy you a cage in Pickens and feed you raw meat and live ammunition.”
“He’d like that, wouldn’t he?” Poteete said, smiling at the thought. “But then he’d hear from someone. I sometimes wish that I came from New York City instead of Pickens. My father doesn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a city with eight million other people. I’ve always understood it.”
“Poteete, come in off the rail. I’ll buy you a goddam ticket to New York City. I’ll rent you an apartment. I’ll buy you furniture.”
“I can’t. I can’t turn back now,” he said, looking straight down toward the perfectly congruent geometry of the quadrangle.
At that moment, Pig was on him. He grabbed Poteete fully around the chest and jerked him backward, trying to lift him over the rail. Mark leaped over the rail and seized one of Poteete’s legs. I got a hand on Poteete s belt and in the midst of the violent crazed thrashing we lifted hi
m over the rail and pinned him against the cement gallery. There was a rush of footsteps on the stairway. A hundred cadets surrounded us in a matter of seconds.
“Pussy.”
“Fucking pussy,” some of them sneered.
“Shut up!” I screamed.
“Shut up!” Pig screamed and they shut up.
Two orderlies from the guardroom brought a stretcher and we strapped Poteete to it, kicking and screaming and delirious now. In his screams, all the demons and the implacable cruelty of the Institute were contained in their purest, most essential form. I went over to speak to him before they took him to the hospital. Above the tumult, loose now upon the barracks with upperclassmen pressing forward to get a glimpse of the freshman who had silenced the system for a full fifteen minutes, I tried to speak to Poteete.
“I’m sorry, Poteete. It was the only way.”
He stopped screaming for a moment. He looked at me and he looked at the mob that surrounded him. He looked back at me. His eyes and the wildness of the secret hive again blazed in frenzied dissociation.
“McLean,” he said, his voice filled with loathing.
Then he spit in my face.
The next morning when the nurse at the infirmary brought him his breakfast, she found Poteete hanging from one of the heating pipes that traversed the ceiling of his room. He had hanged himself with his own uniform belt. I saw Poteete’s father when he came onto campus to identify and claim the body of his son. He was the classic Institute man, erect, lean, and successful. When I saw him he was coming out of the infirmary. He did not look to the left or the right. His wife was weeping inside their Lincoln Continental. I wanted to ask her how it was to be married to a member of the class of 1947, a legend in his own time. I tried to get up enough courage to talk to them, but I could summon up neither courage nor talk. And I saw something in his father’s face that made me glad I would never talk to the man in my entire life. I saw shame. I saw naked embarrassment for the weakness of his son.
I read about the funeral in the newspaper. They did not mention how Poteete had died, but I learned that his first name was John, and that his friends had called him “Bucky.”
Chapter Fifteen
Taps sounded over the barracks. The music of sleep, the music of death, the song that extinguished every light in every room at the Institute. It was light-killing music that brought the coming of the small night creatures with it. In the silence following taps, I went out onto fourth division and stared out over the quadrangle. I was standing in the same spot where Poteete had threatened to jump. In this repose, as cadets began their seven hours and fifteen minutes of officially sanctioned sleep, the insects cautiously came alive to begin their night rule of the barracks. There was the faint rustle of small wings, the secret transit of spiders, the waxy promenades of huge roaches down the concrete galleries, the sudden blaze of fireflies, and sometimes the brown speed of rats scuttling toward garbage. Though the barracks gave the appearance that it could support no animal life at all, the small things had adapted themselves to a frantic existence between taps and reveille. Taps sounded by moonlight, by starlight, when owls swept low over the barracks, when the barracks looked as though it was carved from glaciers and the galleries looked like tiered cakes of gauzy ice. When reveille broke through the sweltering film of morning, the insects and rodents had retired to their secret places and the cadets assumed primacy once again.
I thought about the first fifteen days of my senior year and tried to consider all that was contained and implied in that period. At the Institute, I had learned to be cautious, to distrust the insistence of my own convictions, to cover my tracks, to walk invisibly through the Corps, without drawing too much attention to myself. I had disobeyed my own commandment; I was feeling naked, exposed, and vulnerable. Events had dominated me, forced me into the open terrain, flushed me from the main body of the Corps. As I stood there alone in the darkness, I could not dispel a feeling that something was going to happen to me that I had not prepared for, that I had to ready myself for surprise, for an attack on my flanks. Swarming about me were the disembodied faces of Annie Kate, Pearce, the Bear, the General, Abigail, Poteete, Alexander—faces, faces, faces, too many of them at once. I could not concentrate on any one face. I could not tell which face contained the elements of danger or which redemption. I could not tell which face or faces had given birth to my sense of foreboding. So I returned to the pretty face of Annie Kate Gervais. Again and again and again.
I did not hear Mark come up behind me. I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned toward him to see his dark scowling eyes appraising me. He had the somber eyes of an assassin in love with a cause. His hand moved along my shoulder to my neck. Then he cuffed me playfully on the head.
“Talk!” he ordered.
“Talk about what?” I asked.
“When I worry about things, I talk to you. When you worry, you come out here and stare at the quadrangle. What you’re telling me is that I trust you a lot more than you trust me.”
“That’s not true, Mark,” I answered. “It’s just that I don’t know yet what’s bothering me. I haven’t figured it out yet. I never know what I really think about something until two months later. There’s this delayed reaction for all my emotions.”
“That’s what you get for majoring in English. You ought to change your major to chemistry. There you get blown up with delayed reactions.”
“My roommate with all the answers.”
“Your roommate with some of the answers. I’ve got to get you laughing again. Rooming with you in the last couple of days has been like rooming with cold lasagne. I want you to join the human race again.”
“I’ve been thinking about Poteete, Mark. Can you imagine how lonely he was when he hanged himself? Can you imagine how lonely it would feel to die your plebe year?”
“The knob was out of his gourd.”
“He said something that I can’t figure out. He said something that’s really been bothering me.”
There was the sound of footsteps coming up behind us. Pig and Tradd moved out of the shadows and into the dim frame of light where Mark and I talked. The four of us were silhouetted in the central arch of the upper south gallery.
“I hope the Officer in Charge doesn’t catch us out here,” Tradd said, looking toward the front sally port.
“If he does, I’ll make like a commando, sneak down to the stairwell, and break his spine with a kick to his fat anus,” Pig said.
“What are you two conspirators doing out here after taps? I think it’s my duty to turn you in to the authorities,” Tradd said.
“Will’s got the wrinkled-brow look again,” Mark said.
“It’s the honor court,” Tradd explained. “The poor lad has suddenly been seized with a sense of responsibility and duty since he was elected. I prefer the old Will McLean who used to pray to the gods to sink every building on campus to the bottom of the sea.”
“You got to take some vitamin pills, Will,” Pig said, offering his placebo for every illness, mental or physical, that could afflict a human being. “I got some protein tablets that will pep you right up. You also got to start doing some bench presses. Your pecs are deflated.”
“What exercises do you do to build up those overdeveloped muscles in your brain, Pig?” Mark asked.
“What’s eating you, Mark?” said Pig.
“I’ve listened to you brag about your body for three years and I’m getting sick of it.”
“Easy, boys,” I said, moving between them as I felt the fuel of tension ignite between them.
“We weren’t going to fight, were we, paisan?” Pig said, unsmilingly examining Mark’s face.
“No, we aren’t going to fight, Pig,” Mark said.
“Good,” I said. “For a minute I thought I was going to have to whip both your asses.”
“You’d have what was left after I punched them around for a while,” Tradd said, slapping playfully at Pig’s head.
Pig ducked and ran
his fingers through his hair like a comb.
“Don’t mess with my braids, man. Don’t track up the Vitalis.”
We all turned and looked out into the quadrangle. The four of us stood with our shoulders touching, leaning against the railing. Directly across from us, a T Company freshman shuffled down the gallery to the latrine. For two or three minutes we did not speak a word until Tradd broke the silence by saying, “I never thought I’d come to love a place as much as I love the Institute.”
“It’s the best goddam school in the country. No doubt about it,” Pig agreed.
“How do you feel about it?” Mark asked me.
“I still don’t know if I like it or hate it. I feel both ways about it sometimes.”
Tradd spoke up quickly, “You’re just upset about Poteete, Will. What you don’t understand is that something like that could happen anywhere. Poteete was mentally unstable. Some people just don’t belong here.”
“They used to say that about you, Tradd,” I snapped back. “Do you remember the cadre saying that about you every day of our freshman year?”
“But they were wrong, Will,” Tradd said in a patient, conciliatory voice. “And I didn’t go out and hang myself.”
“I bet the kid didn’t take any vitamins,” Pig said. “I bet he had a deficiency.”
“It’s good to have an expert in deficiency rooming with us,” Mark murmured almost inaudibly
“What do you think about the Institute, Mark?” I said. “I mean what do you really think about it?”
“I could never have made it at any other school,” he answered. “I’d have flunked out my first semester if they hadn’t made me stay in every night and study”
“Best school in the goddam country,” Pig said. “Harvard and Yale ain’t shit compared to the Institute and that’s a proven fact.”