Paul Vacendak, the secretary of the honor court, opened the door and told us the court had reached a verdict.
We knelt together in the center of that small room, held hands, and Mark led us in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Pig’s hand was slick with sweat when I grasped it.
Entering the room, we took our seats and tried to interpret the expressions on the members’ faces. But these boys were now seasoned veterans of judging their peers, and they gave no overt signals of how they had voted.
Gauldin Grace’s voice rang out in the room. “The accused will rise and face the honor court.”
Pig rose to attention and faced them with a rigid, implacable courage.
“The members of this court find you guilty as charged.”
Pig’s knees buckled at the sound of the word guilty. He staggered forward a single unconscious step as though he had not clearly heard the verdict, as though he needed clarification. Then he turned back toward us and put his arms out to us like a child asking his mother for protection.
Then he let out a cry of pain I will carry with me every single day of my life. The cry was so unexpected, so high-pitched and despairing. It was the cry of a small animal, a tiny nocturnal creature, a herbivore that depended on stealth and speed for survival. There was no strength in the cry, and it reduced my roommate to the level of prey.
We caught him in mid-stagger. Mark pulled his arm around his shoulder and took his whole weight.
“Gauldin, could we have a few minutes before we go to the parade ground?” I asked. .
“Hurry, Will,” he answered. “He can call his parents from the witness room. You know the procedure. And Will.”
“Yeh, Gauldin,” I said, unable to look at him.
“We’re all sorry. It was horrible. But we voted the way we had to. The guys want you to know that they’re thinking about you.”
“Tell them thanks, Gauldin.”
When we returned to the witness room, we sat him down in one of the wing-backed leather chairs near the door. We did not know how to look at him or how to speak to him. Already, we were putting distance between ourselves and him. We were beginning the merciless process of turning him into a stranger, someone we had never known, someone we would never know again, someone so untouchable and unclean of spirit that we would not acknowledge him on the streets if we passed him ten years hence. That was the process Mark, Tradd, and I had begun as we fought for last words to say to him, as we struggled toward a humane and brotherly farewell.
As we sat there, we heard the drummers begin their cold tattoo of banishment on the parade ground, heard its sinister echo as it pulsed along the galleries of the four battalions, as it summoned the regiment for the drumming out.
“Just remember this,” I said desperately. “This isn’t the end of the world. There are other colleges and they won’t even know what this fucking honor system is. They won’t even know what a military school is. You can start over. The General will write you a good letter of recommendation. He’ll just say you couldn’t adjust to the military way of life. You’ve got to forget this as soon as you can.”
“You’ve got to call your parents,” Mark said. “They’ll be waiting to hear what happened.”
“I didn’t tell them that I’d been accused of an honor violation,” he said, breathing hard, as though he had just completed a longdistance run.
“What!” Mark shouted. “You didn’t prepare them at all?”
He lifted his eyes as though he heard the drums for the first time. “How could I tell my parents that their son might get kicked out of the Institute? They would never have gotten over it,” he whispered.
“What do you think this will do to them?” Mark said, but softened immediately. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“Do you want me to call them?” Tradd asked. “I could break it to them gently or even better, I could have Mother do it. She always knows what to say in situations like this.”
“No, I’ll tell them when the time is right,” he said. “When it’s right for me.”
“Try not to think about what’s happening on the parade ground tonight,” Tradd advised. “Don’t think about it and you’ll get over it much more quickly.”
I looked at Pig and said, “I’ve got to ask you to give me your ring.”
“No,” he said, furiously clenching his fist.
“You have no choice,” I said, lowering my eyes. “I’ve got to give it to Gauldin when I leave the room.”
“Let me keep the ring, Will,” he begged, “I earned it. I earned the right to wear it. They’re taking everything else away from me.”
“Give me the ring,” I said.
“It’s mine, Will.”
“Not anymore.”
“Give him the fucking ring,” Mark said savagely, turning toward the door. “You’re making it too hard.”
He removed the ring and threw it at my head. It missed by inches and struck the lampshade on the far side of the room.
“Be a man. Be a fucking man,” Mark said. “Let’s see some of that pride you bullshitted about.”
“You’ll see it, paisan,” he said, but a light went out in his eyes and something deadly replaced that light. “You’ll see it and you’ll always remember Dante Pignetti for his pride. I promise you that.”
“You can catch the train for New York if you hurry,” Tradd said, checking his watch. “Or else you can catch a Trailways downtown. One leaves at three in the morning, I think.”
I retrieved the ring, placed it in my breast pocket, and walked over to him. There was a knock on the door.
“It’s time,” I said.
He rose to his feet and turned toward the door with his back toward us.
“Good-bye, paisans,” he said. “And thank you. Thank you from my heart. My heart, paisans.”
We surrounded him and the three of us embraced him for the last time. He did not look at us and he did not return our embraces. He pulled away from us and left the room without looking back. I felt his ring in my breast pocket with my hand, and I felt my own heart beating against the gold band.
When we reached the parade ground the Corps was assembling for the drumming out. My body felt as if it had been shot full of Novocain. We did not walk; we staggered out of Durrell Hall and watched as the regiment divided into two parts, like a huge cell in the process of a grotesque, unnatural mitosis. The Corps split up into two enormous lines stretching from one end of the parade ground to the other, a thousand cadets staring at a thousand other cadets, with a corridor six feet wide between them. It was down this corridor that he would march for the last time in a ruthless parade of one. It was called The Walk of Shame by the Corps and it was the most dreaded and barbaric ceremony at the Institute. I had sent nine boys on The Walk of Shame. I had felt a perfect justification for it and had convinced myself it was the price of dishonor in a school in which honor was a sacred word. I had swelled with power at my ability to summon the sleeping regiment.
Listening to the shouts of the company commanders moving the sluggish platoons into position, dressing up to the right, I took my place at the end of the immense file, out of place, far away from R Company, but at the spot where he would take his last step on campus. There was a yellow cab parked at the north end of the parade ground. The light in the cab was on, its motor was running, and the cab driver was smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper.
I stood between Mark and Tradd. I wanted to say something to them but there were no proper words. I wanted desperately to hold their hands, to touch them again, to make some human connection that would make the darkness right again. But I was a cadet who was well trained and I stood at attention, waiting.
The drums ceased and the parade ground was as silent as an inland sea. At the other end of the parade ground, I heard Gauldin Grace’s harsh, overextended voice screaming out the findings of the honor court.
“Gentlemen, the honor court has met tonight and has found Pignetti, D. A., Company R, guilty of the h
onor violation of stealing. His name will never be spoken by any man from Carolina Military Institute. He will never return to this campus so long as he may live. His name and memory are anathema to anyone who aspires to wear the ring. Let him go from us and never be heard from again. Let him begin The Walk of Shame.”
The drums resumed their pulse. He began his last slow walk a quarter of a mile from his roommates. As he walked between the first two cadets in the line, they performed a simultaneous about-face and turned their backs to him. The next two cadets repeated the maneuver and the next two and the next two and the next two, turning from him as he passed before them.
Nameless, he marched in step on the long unrepeatable promenade between the divided regiment. Nameless, he had become a disgraced regiment of one as he navigated the narrow green corridor of grass between the backs of boys.
There was a dark intimacy to this ceremony of excommunication. I could hear the breathing of the two thousand, but that was all. This was a ritual amazing because of its silence. I stood in the grass awaiting the moment I would renounce my roommate.
With a sidelong glance, I studied his proud approach between the lines. I began to read the mysteries between those lines. As he walked he hurt me. As he walked, I could feel him changing me forever. As he came, I could feel my part in all of this. His face came into focus; it was set like statuary. He was marching like a creature with intimate associations with the depths, something eyeless and with a nervous system of such primitive simplicity that he was beyond pain, beyond touch. His face held a cold strange beauty as he approached, as his peers danced their about-faces in his passage, a rippling, exotically symmetrical maneuvering of the regiment, each in his own time, each a stunning duet of rejection.
I know now what I should have done. I always know it too late. Now I know what the code of friendship required of Tradd, Mark, and me. We should have left that line and made that walk with him. We should have lifted him up on our shoulders, and carried him through the lines. We should have stripped off our uniforms and hurled them at the honor committee, ripped off our insignia and epaulets and flung them at all those who dared turn from us. We should have walked together, arm in arm, the four of us, laughing and mocking, inseparable, and shouting “fuck you” to all who turned their backs on us, kicking their asses, and daring anyone to make a move toward any of us. We should have swaggered down those disciplined ranks, drunken and out of control, delirious with the powerful insulin of our shared history. We should have walked with the bright shimmer of murderous, unrepentant angels and accepted the banishment from the Corps together. We should have set the barracks on fire, salted the parade ground, and spat on the great seal of the Institute. Together, we should have gone out there in a blaze of obscenity and sacrilege. We should have become monstrous men and our salvation would have lain in the very nature of our monstrousness. We should have abandoned that campus with outrage and rebellion and wildness. We should have vomited out the bile of those four years in the barracks and walked as four against the two thousand, four against the regiment, shouting, “No, no, no, no.”
But we did nothing; we were boys.
He saw us when he heard Mark sobbing. None of us had ever heard Mark cry before. It was a new sound in the universe. Mark must have held that first sob for a full half-minute; it burst out of his lungs in an explosion of grief. When Mark broke, I felt permission to break and I passed that permission to Tradd. It was a simple weeping he saw as he passed us, three boys crying and crying hard as we stood on the trimmed greensward listening to the drums that dishonored our roommate.
He stopped as he passed us by and spoke to all of us. His voice was stern and peremptory. “Turn,” he commanded.
Mark had not executed an about-face when he passed in front of him, nor had I, nor had Tradd.
“Turn, paisans,” he said, returning to Mark. “That’s how it’s played. Now turn, or they’ll get you.”
“Get laid, asshole-breath,” Mark said through tears.
“Turn,” he shouted as he slapped Mark slightly, lovingly, on the cheek, and placing one hand on Mark’s shoulder and another on his hip, he kissed Mark and turned him. He kissed me and turned me. He kissed Tradd and turned him. The entire regiment now faced away from the nameless one. He entered the running cab and it pulled away from the curb and drove slowly toward the Gates of Legrand. The Walk of Shame was over.
Immediately the parade ground reverberated with the shouted commands of seventeen company commanders assembling their companies for the march back to the barracks. We walked the length of the parade ground to join R Company, passing behind the other three battalions and saying nothing to each other. I watched the slow solitary progress of the cab as it moved down the Avenue of Remembrance. I was surprised to see it stop, turn around, and come back in the opposite direction, pass us by, then drive past the military science building and disappear behind the Armory. Even in his removal from the Corps, he would refuse to honor tradition.
“Where’s he going?” I heard Tradd say behind me. “He’s going to miss his train if he doesn’t hurry.”
I glanced at the clock high atop the parapets of second battalion. It was nearly time for the 11:42 train to cross the Ashley River.
“Maybe he’ll try to flag the train down as it goes through campus,” Mark said. “Can you imagine how his parents are going to take it?”
Then we heard the whistle of the train as it approached the Ashley River, the old comfortable sound, as much a part of the interior life of cadets as the single note of steel, as the ritual locking of the gates at night.
It did not hit me until we had reached our platoons in R Company and then it hit me in a killing blaze of light. It hit me and I was running, sprinting again. “The train,” I screamed.
I do not remember that run very well, only the strangeness of it, the odd perception of time being both motionless and frantically rushing by at the same time. I remember the battalions beginning to move out, the call of cadence, the shape of the dark chapel, the fecund smell of the Corps’s trampled grass, the shadows of missiles and tanks, the flag illuminated high above second battalion, above the clock, the pavement, the sound of my footsteps on the pavement; but I do not remember the act of running. I know that I ran but the run was a dream. I ran as though I were obese and exhausted and beaten.
I saw the train hurtling across the trestle and I heard the screams of the cab driver. I saw my roommate marching resolutely toward the train, dazed, in the same resigned, unequivocal walk that had carried him through the regiment. The drums had not stopped for him nor would they ever stop. His walk was stiffly military, unbearably proud; it was not faltering or hesitant. He had gone as far as he would go. He had done all the things he would do. He had lived all the life he wanted to live. He needed one last moment of pride and honor. He was taking his powerful body toward the train. That body, which we all feared, had fears of its own and could not face a father’s hurt eyes, a mother’s disappointment, or the canceled wedding trip of a black-haired girl. He feared a life where friends could not speak his name. He could not think of the deeper hurt and it was not in him to think of it. As always, he was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart. We had turned our backs on him, but now he was walking to a place where there would be no turning away, no loss of contact, no refusal to acknowledge or touch. He would make a last insane connection. The train would not turn for him. There would be no about-faces.
“No!” I screamed while the terrible squeal of the brakes cut through the night air as the engineer spotted the boy on the tracks.
He turned toward me and smiled. I swear he smiled and said a single word I could not hear because of the noise of the brakes.
But I knew the word.
“Paisan,” he said, and turned to meet the train.
That night the Corps learned something about a different, harsher code of honor. They found him in sections and pieces along the marsh that bordered th
e trestle. Those few of us who saw his body after his death still become horrified when we try to describe what the train did to him. What the train undid.
I turned away from him for a second time. I turned away and vomited, but kept walking, putting distance between me and the trestle and the marsh. People were running past me now, cadets shouting, “My God,” behind me. I heard the Bear ordering everyone back to the barracks, and felt a numbness overcome me and I could not speak or cry or think. I just knew that 1 needed to put distance between myself and that torn, lifeless thing I had loved for four years. As I walked and as I heard the noise and tumult and confusion behind me, I understood for the first time why the punishment for Lot’s wife was so severe. There were times when it was unforgivable to look back.
It was an hour later when I returned to the barracks. I do not remember where I went during that hour. The OG in fourth battalion unlocked the gate and let me pass without reporting me. I climbed the dark silent steps to the fourth division. The light in our room was on and Mark and Tradd were waiting up for me. We looked at each other but there was nothing to say.
I did not tell Tradd and Mark what I had seen by the tracks. They had already heard and asked no questions. In the mirror I saw my face. It was the face of a boy who had seen too much. Getting into bed, I began listening to the voice inside me. At first, I didn’t think it was my voice. It sounded so warlike, so vengeful, so invincible. It sounded cold and evil, but it was a comfort to me in the following days when I would not leave my bed, when I only wanted to listen to the voice. “I will get them,” the voice said. “I will get them.”
Chapter Forty-two
For three days after the death of Dante Pignetti, I lay in my bed. Mark and Tradd thought I was mourning Pig’s loss but that was not it. I was studying what special gifts I could bring to the subject of vengeance. I was biding my time and waiting for the cold black fury to pass over me.
For three days I slept over eighteen hours a day, gathering my strength and dreaming of The Ten. I tried to interpret the nature of their secret agenda against us. They had moved against cadets before and had always succeeded in their mission. Their table of organization included the President and the Commandant of the Institute. But I had knowledge of them; I would watch how they operated against the enemies who had broken their membrane of secrecy.