When I reached the quadrangle I looked around, trying to spot where the Bear was hiding. I did not see him, so I began to tease the R Company freshmen who were already lined like bottles in their respective squads. I was part of an early warning system that alerted sleeping seniors in the battalion when the Bear or a tactical officer slipped into the barracks to write up delinquency reports on tardy upperclassmen.
I walked to the front of the company area and faced the freshmen.
“Good morning, dumbheads,” I shouted.
“Good morning, sir,” they answered in unison.
“Isn’t it great to be alive and a member of the Corps of Cadets?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” they roared.
“I love this place, dumbheads. I think I’ve found myself a home. Isn’t it great to wake up on a freezing winter morning in pitch darkness? Don’t you just love it, douchebags?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All over America, dumbheads, on lesser college campuses, campuses that do not specialize in producing whole men, boys exactly your age are turning over in their sleep and touching the huge, succulent boobs of their girl friends and moaning that they have to get up for their first class at two o’clock in the afternoon. They’re hung over from a frat party and an all-night sexual orgy that started while you were engaged in a sweat party on third division. Doesn’t that sound disgusting, dumbheads? Can you imagine going to college to have fun? Pop off!”
“No, sir!” they shouted.
I smelled the cigar smoke in the dark morning air. I had been waiting for it.
“Do you know why I came to the Institute, scumbags? Pop off!”
“No, sir!” they replied.
“I wanted to model myself after a great man. I wanted to model myself after that paragon of military virtue, that officer who was wounded in the behind while fleeing the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge, that fighting man of such superlative qualities that he has returned to his alma mater as commandant in charge of discipline. I came to the Institute, dumbheads, because I wanted to be exactly like Colonel Thomas Berrineau, affectionately known as the Bear. Please give him a big round of applause, wad-wastes. This man is like a father to me.”
The freshmen applauded loudly and stiffly. It is hard to be cheerful when you are bracing in twenty-degree weather.
“Good morning, Bubba,” Colonel Berrineau said, stepping up beside me and examining the R Company freshmen.
“Good morning, Colonel,” I said. “How can you smoke that thing at six-fifteen in the morning, sir?”
“It helps me get rid of the sickly sweet taste of toothpaste, lamb, and it helps young lambs like you to smell the Bear sneaking up behind you. I got to give you bums some kind of break.”
Then in a loud, commanding voice he addressed the plebes in Romeo Company. If the Bear’s voice did not wake the seniors, they were probably dead.
“Is this bum McLean spreading sedition among my lamblets? Pop off!”
“Yes, sir!” they roared.
“Just why are you down here so early, Mr. McLean?” the Bear asked me knowingly.
“Sir,” I said, turning toward the plebes. “I’m down here because of my concern for these young dumbheads. Just look at them, sir. No pride, no spirit, no command presence to any of them. Now you and I are from the Old Corps, Colonel, and we are accustomed to a certain quality of douchebag that we are just not attracting to the Institute in these sad, decadent times. For instance, Jones. Where’s my man Jones?”
An emaciated, bespectacled freshman from Atlanta stepped quickly forward from the second platoon. “Now, Colonel, when Mr. Jones was a young man he contracted polio of the face and had to wear a brace on his nose and upper lip for the first five years of his life. You’ll notice that his nose still has a limp. Show the Colonel that painful limp in your left nostril, Jones.”
Jones wrinkled his nose, rabbitlike, several times for effect.
“A terrible affliction, you will agree, Colonel,” I continued. “But Jones has overcome it, much to his credit. He has to sleep with his nose suspended from a pulley but otherwise he’s a model cadet, as I was when I was a freshman. What disturbed me about Jones, though, was when he told me he had applied for a job at the zoo shoveling elephant manure and was turned down. Finally, in desperation, he applied to the Institute and they gave him a four-year academic scholarship. Colonel, I tell you these are trying times.”
“Young lamb,” the Bear said to Jones, inspecting the freshman’s twitchy nose more carefully. “Is that job at the zoo still open? We in the Commandant’s Department have been worried about a career for Mr. McLean for quite some time.”
The plebes shook with repressed, uncontainable laughter. The laughter of freshmen was a rare commodity on the quadrangle of the regiment.
Seniors were racing from their rooms from all over the barracks, tucking in their shirts as they came, shoes untied, hats askew, and eyes trained on their watches as they tried to outrun the final bugle that would make them late on the Bear’s clipboard.
“You’ve got a good early warning system, Bubba,” the Bear said, watching the harried movement of seniors.
“Are you going to the last game tonight?” I asked the Colonel.
“Sure, Bubba, I never miss a VMI game. I like to see what cadets from a good military college look like. How do you think our chances are?”
“They’ll probably stomp us, Colonel,” I answered. “The one thing the Institute has taught me is how to lose gracefully and often. Sir, I must bid you adieu. My squad is incomplete and anxious without me to bring up the rear on the march to mess.”
“I’ll see you at parade next Friday, McLean,” he warned. “You’ll be off orders then, and I’ll be checking to make sure your squad is complete with a senior private who walks like a duck and carries an M-1 like it was radioactive.”
“M-,” I said, puzzled. “Isn’t that a sauce you put on a steak?”
“No, it’s something I’ll put up your behind if you’re not at that parade, Bubba.”
“I can hardly wait to hear the drums roll and the guidons snap in the wind, Colonel. I’ve also hired a plane to seed the clouds and make it rain like hell that day so the damn thing will be canceled. I think it’s a crime to make a jock go to parade for any occasion. We look silly out there, and people laugh at us and hurt our feelings.”
The last bugle sounded. “By the way, Bubba,” he whispered, walking to my platoon with me, “do you remember that ten I found painted on that freshman’s door?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “That was a long time ago.”
“It looks like a coincidence,” he said. “Some platoon sergeant painted that because it was the tenth knob that had been sent packing out of that company. I ended his career as an artist, but I wanted you to know that it looks like a false alarm.”
“Colonel, I don’t think we have anything to worry about anymore. Pearce has made it through the worst part of the year. It’s getting toward the end of February, and I haven’t even received a note from him in two months.”
“We’re just staying vigilant, Bubba. We’re just getting Pearce through this school one day at a time. This is going to be the Year of the Nigger in the history of the Institute. Now get in line, Bubba. All the seniors made it to formation because of your big mouth. I won’t report you for unshined shoes if we beat VMI tonight.”
“We’ll try, Colonel,” I said, saluting him as he left the barracks.
That evening I walked through the front door of the Armory to play the last game I would ever play for Carolina Military Institute. I had come to the day when I would face the world without a sport. The Armory smelled of loss and passage and absent crowds; it shimmered with memories of old forgotten games and the death of athletes. Something vital in me would die on this night. I had come to my absolute limits as an athlete, and they were not very great.
Athlete. The very word was beautiful to me. I looked up at the scoreboard and thought, Has there ever been
a boy who loved this game as much as I have loved it? I had known the praise of crowds and knew nothing else on earth to equal it. When I played basketball, I was possessed by a nakedness of spirit, an absolute purity, a divine madness when I was let loose to ramble between the lines. Always, I was reckless and moving at full speed, and I never learned the potency of stillness, the craft of subtlety. I had moved about the court for four years without control, as though I were racing from basket to basket putting out fires or hurling myself on live grenades. I had played the game the best I could but was beaten time and time again. But I had willed myself to be, if not gifted, at least someone to be watched closely, and at times when the ball came my way and I came at my opponents in full flight, an athlete to be feared. I could hurt them only with recklessness. There were times when they knew I was a burning boy, a dancing, roaring, skipping, brawling boy—moments of pure empyrean magic when the demon of sport was born in the howl of my bloodstream, when my body and the flow of the game commingled in a wild and accidental mating and I turned into something I was never meant to be: an athlete who could not be stopped, a dreaded and respected gamesman loose and rambling on the court. I remembered those moments because there were so few of them and because the sport had tamed me with the knowledge of my own limitations, my earnest mediocrity. Yet, while controlling the flow of games with the unstealable dribble, I had been more truly alive than I would ever be again. I had learned that my grace came only in the full abandoned divinity of flight. I had known the joy, the pure orgasmic joy of the dance. It was a day of last roses, last dances.
As I walked toward the locker room, I thought about how I feared things being irrevocably finished. Had it been that long ago that I first entered this gymnasium as a freshman? Its size had startled me, its aura of seriousness and the big time. Had it been that long ago that I was eighteen? How could a human being deal with such swiftness, with such unrecallability?
I entered the dressing room, steamy from the overworked radiators, noisy with the nervous banter of the team dressing.
“Big Bo,” I said, acknowledging Bo Maybank, who was wrapping the ankles of Doug Cumming on the training table.
“Will,” he said, pleased to see me. “I won five bucks from Doug a half-hour ago. I made ten straight set shots from the top of the key.”
“Never bet with midgets, Will,” Doug said, slapping at my behind as I passed them on the way to my locker. Athletes have a strange but genuine compulsion to touch each others asses.
I paused by Reuben Clapsaddle, who was lacing up his size eighteen shoes.
“My, what big feet you have, Grandma,” I said.
“All the better to stomp little guards with, my dear,” Reuben answered.
Johnny DuBruhl, the other starting guard and an inch shorter than I was, came up behind me and gave me a stinging slap on the rump. “Hurry up, little man, we’ve got a ball game to play and I’ve got a date after the game.”
“You ought to see the girl, Will,” Doug Cumming shouted from the training table.
“Don’t move ’til I finish taping your ankles, Doug,” Bo commanded.
Doug continued, “There’s been a breakout at the zoo, man.”
“Eat me, Cumming,” Johnny shouted across the locker room.
“Hey, Doug,” Dave Dunbar, a second string forward who was from the same Ohio town as Johnny, said, “do you know what Johnny’s girl does for a living? She’s got a real good job, man. They test new treads on tanks by running over her face before they send them out to the field.”
“At least I’ve got a date,” Johnny said. “That’s more than I can say for the rest of you horny bastards.”
“I thought I saw Johnny with a girl after the last game,” Dave said. “But then I looked again and saw that I was mistaken.”
“How’d you know you were wrong, Dave?” I asked.
“I drove past them in my Volkswagen and she chased after the car barking,” he answered.
“I know you guys are just jealous,” Johnny said. “I’m out there getting it while you guys are back in the barracks wearing one white glove.”
Reuben changed the subject by saying, “Did you hear that Johnson of ’65 got killed in Vietnam, Will?”
“No,” I answered, with real shock.
“Both co-captains of the ’65 football team were killed within a week of each other. You knew that McBride was killed in a firefight near Da Nang last week,” Johnny continued, twirling a basketball expertly on his index finger. “Those were two really good guys. Its funny. It’s kind of normal when I hear about regular Joes from the Corps getting zapped, but it always sort of surprises me when a jock has his brains blown out.”
“Maybe basketball players just don’t give a damn about this country,” a high-pitched voice said from near the equipment room. It was Bo Maybank, and his tiny rodent’s face was flushed with anger and the emotion of speaking something he had wanted to say to us for a long time.
“Oh, oh,” Johnny said, laughing, “I got the Midget started on Vietnam.”
“Speak for yourself, Bo,” Reuben said, staring at the manager.
“The Big Fella ain’t playing no hide and seek with the little yellow people. That’s a war for military dicks and Lilliputians.”
“You don’t mind other people getting killed for you, I guess, Reuben?” Bo muttered in a trembling, barely audible voice, nervously searching the room for allies.
“Just shut up and wrap ankles like a good little duckbutt,” Doug said.
“I don’t mind other people getting killed for Big Reuben,” said Reuben. “Shit, I was so happy when I found out that I was too tall to get drafted that I almost went out and bought me a new record. Can you see me in Nam, Bo? I’d be dead in a fucking week. It’s hard to be quiet in the jungle when you’re six foot ten, man. The Vietcong would hear my big feet coming ten miles away. I could just see me on my tippy-toes trying to keep quiet. Crunch—Crunch—Crunch. They’d see me coming, stop eating rice for a sec, go blow fucking Reuben’s legs off, then go back and make up a new batch of soy sauce. No sir, I’m happy to be six-ten and leave the fighting to you little poots.”
“Let’s think about VMI, boys,” I said, amazed at my own sanctimonious tone.
“That’s right, guys,” Bo said penitently. “I shouldn’t have started that before a game. The important thing now is the game. Will’s right. I’m sorry. No kidding. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s OK, Midget,” Johnny said. “We were all upset when we heard about those two.”
“I’m sorry, everybody,” Bo said.
“No problem, Bo,” I said.
“We’re living in fucked times,” Doug said, doing knee bends to loosen his legs.
Bo Maybank walked up to me and began massaging the dense constricted muscles in my neck and shoulders. He massaged my face and neck with one of his towels. The towels, as always, were hot and slightly damp from the dryer. “Score a basket for me tonight, Will,” he whispered so Reuben could not hear.
“I’ll score one for you and one for Vietnam,” I chided him.
“I hope I didn’t upset the team, Will,” he said. “I don’t know what got into me.”
“Light stuff, Bo,” I said, pulling several hairs out of his almost hairless legs.
Bo stood barely five feet two in his stocking feet and weighed slightly less than a hundred pounds. He looked like a species of mankind not yet fully evolved. His skin was flushed a pale blue, as though his thinness would allow you to study his entire circulatory system without cutting into his body. His hands were thin and spidery and when stretched out over the hide of a basketball had the delicacy and fragile beauty of a fish skeleton.
He was also the best shooter on the team, of that there was no doubt whatsoever. He had the pure artistry of the natural. Each night as we left the gym we could see Bo shooting at the glass backboard with a Wilson Special that looked like a beachball in his hands. His wrist, thin as wire, would shoot the ball toward the rim and we would h
ear the pure sharp song of leather snapping through the net that was the signature of our trade. Once he had made eighteen straight set shots from the top of the circle and Coach Byrum admitted aloud that Bo was one of the best shooters he had ever seen. Then, in an indifferent aside, he winked at us and said, “But who cares about a five-foot midget who shoots good?” I had found Bo sobbing in the equipment room after he did not show up in the mess hall for dinner.
I looked up at Bo and smiled. I had never understood why Bo Maybank liked me so much better than I liked myself. I knew it had something to do with my being his vicarious counterpart in the game he was too small to play. When I had a bad game, he suffered more than I did, and when I did well, his entire face radiated joy. I was often embarrassed by how much Bo preferred me to my teammates, but I also needed his gentle and uncritical advocacy of me—I would always need people like Bo in my life. He had simply chosen me from the rest and sometimes a choice is explanation enough and requires no further study or elaboration. His hands were still on my shoulder when Coach Byrum entered the room.
It was painful to watch Byrum’s face as he pleaded with us to win the final game of the season. It was an exhausted face, one full of absurd dignity and the jowly looseness that often comes to men who face an uncertain future and who drink too much because of that uncertainty. He knew and we knew that his days as basketball coach at the Institute were over. Byrum was not a great coach, that I had decided long ago, but he was a humane one; and I learned more from his frailties, his terrors, and his flawed vulnerable humanity than I would have learned from a great coach’s strength.
After each pre-game speech during that long, losing season, there was a terrifying moment when we thought Coach Byrum would break down in front of us and cry out of frustration and humiliation before the whole team. His voice was raspy and eroded, as though he were breaking up from inside. He held his stomach with his left hand as he spoke and he kept a cup full of Maalox by his seat during games. Several times during the season I wanted to embrace his large, tragic frame and beg his forgiveness for not being a better athlete. Whenever he looked at me with his haunted frightened eyes, he broke my heart.