Honor and Duty (20 page)

No one could help Pee Wee McCloud. A phobic fear of water meant that his aquatic background never graduated past shallow baths with a highly trusted rubber ducky. He joined the drowners, the Rock Squad, learned the rudiments of the Australian crawl through sheer willpower, and was prepared for testing. In the platform event, Pee Wee had frozen. Halfway up the ladder, the fear of drowning had met the fear of heights. He locked on to the ladder with limbs and teeth with such commitment that it was difficult to see where he ended and the ladder began.

“Whew!” hissed Peck “Ravine” Mankoff. “If he could wrap his dick around a rung, I think he’d do it.”

Pee Wee panted as the ladder swung high above the pool, the ladder jerking with every flex of his large, grunting form. The idea of climbing up so he could drown in twenty feet of cold, chlorinated water failed to inspire him to greater heights.

“YOU COME DOWN FROM ZERE RIGHT NOW, YOU KNUCKLEHEAD PLEBE!” cried Mr. Flauck, threatening with his stick. “CLIMB OR JUMP! YOU ARE BLOCKING MY LADDER!”

Pee Wee released the steel rung from his small mouth to scream, with great candor, “NO, SIR!”

A young lieutenant, four years out of the Academy, pulled off sweats, dove in, and climbed up. He spoke quietly to Pee Wee, who moaned, his eyes tightly shut, his teeth ready to pop from his gums under the pressure of his mandible on the rung. The lieutenant spoke more emphatically. The lieutenant yelled. He screamed. “May I touch you?” he roared. Plebes could be starved, sweated to walls, push-upped to death, tormented, and kept awake for months, but they could not be touched without consent. Pee Wee sort of nodded.

The officer would free one finger, then two, and the original finger would lock around the ladder. Nothing West Point could do—finger torts, psychic torture, starvation, recitation, mass abuse, punishment slugs, sleep deprivation, loss of football
privileges, court-martial, or firing squad—could compare to releasing the ladder. The survival-swimming program had encountered primordial fear and played it to a tie in double overtime.

“Who knows this man?” asked the lieutenant. My fist came out.

I was sent to retrieve Pee Wee. I didn’t mention to anyone my hysterical fear of heights, first discovered on the roof of the Empire Metal Works in the Mission rail yards, and barely conquered when I had done the platform event. Oh, man, I get to do it again. I dove in and climbed, trembling, heart frail, loins weak.

“Hey, Pee Wee.” I faced him from the other side of the ladder. Both of us were cold. It was difficult for me to hold on, because his body had merged into the ladder, leaving little to grasp.

He released the rung from his teeth, his eyes scrunched closed. “Kai?” he said, teeth clamping on to the rung again.

“Yo. Climb down with me. We’ll go one rung at a time.” I adjusted my grip, and the ladder swung. Pee Wee groaned “no.”

“Okay, I’ll jump first. I’ll be in the water with the lieutenant and a swim ring. Then you. We put the ring on you and pull you to the edge. Mr. Flauck’ll even let you climb out on his ‘valls.’ C’mon, man.” I looked down, my gorge rising. I closed my eyes. “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”

He looked down. “Oh, shit,” he said slowly. “Go ’way,” he whispered.

I couldn’t leave him. Time passed. “Pee Wee. This duck comes into the O Club and says, ‘A round for the whole house. Put it on my bill.’ ”

Pee Wee opened one eye. I made like Groucho Marx, holding on with one hand while fluttering eyebrows and dusting an imaginary cigar. I smiled brilliantly while teetering. He shut his eye.

“Duck goes to the commissary,” I said. “Duck says, ‘Give me a box of rubbers.’ The clerk says, ‘Shall I put that on your bill?’ The duck says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not that kind of duck.’ ”

Pee Wee’s face closed up like a wet fist. He shook, and we swayed, the ladder’s metal pins clacking hollowly. He forced his eyes open, blinking, his pupils huge. His saliva was everywhere. “Get down,” he hissed. “Too heavy. We’ll fall!”

I closed my eyes. “Pee Wee,” I said, my voice unsteady. “I’m scared too. C’mon. We’ll go together.”

He violently shook his head. “No. Go ’way,” he hissed.

I had failed. I wanted to climb down, but this was West Point. I’d be expected to climb the ladder. “Take care, Pee Wee.” I climbed to the top and dropped, for a long time, until I hit the pool, hoping the sound would invite him. It didn’t.

Mr. Flauck and the lieutenant sat in vigil at poolside, taking lunch, dinner, and a vat of coffee. They took turns sleeping. At four sharp the following morning, Pee Wee McCloud fell asleep and dropped into the pool as if Kansas had landed in a bathtub. With a classic, world-record-setting cannonball impact, Pee Wee emptied the hated pool of half its wretched contents. A drenched Mr. Flauck and lieutenant pulled him out before any water got in his lungs. Flauck filled him with hot chocolate and sandwiches. Pee Wee kept pulling on his teeth with trembling, rigid fingers, his body shaking. His teeth and gums hurt from chewing steel.

Mr. Flauck patted him kindly. “Izz okay, young Plebe. Dreenk chocolate.”

The lieutenant stared at Mr. Flauck. This was the man who would detain him from diving into the water to rescue a drowning Plebe until the last possible moment. “
Nein, nein
—vait, vait! Bubbles,
ja?
I zink he still moves.”

Pee Wee was placed in the hospital for an overnight psychiatric evaluation. I had introduced him to Mike Benjamin and Sonny Rappa during the Plebe Encampment at Lake Fredericks, and I gathered them for a visit to the one-bed psych ward.

As our heels echoed hollowly down the hall, Mike said, “You know, after graduation, I want to be a doctor.” Sonny and I stopped, open-mouthed. We were being trained to be warriors, not healers.

“Ya picked a doozy of a pre-med program,” said Sonny.

Pee Wee was eating strawberry Jell-O. I wanted some. Mike and Sonny said a few words and left.

“You guys were my first visitors,” said Pee Wee methodically. “If I get stuck up there again, just shoot me. Or, tell me another joke, which’ll have the same effect.” When the shrinks let him out, Pee Wee would have to face Mr. Flauck and the ladder.

“Hope I didn’t make it worse for you.”

He turned his head away. “I just fucked up,” he said.

“You know, Pee Wee, when I was a kid, I went crazy.”

He looked at me. “I thought you went nuts after you got here.”

I laughed. I remembered the insanity god and the kind Chinese woman I used to dream of before Leo Washington took over my nightmares. “I used to laugh when nothing was funny. I couldn’t stop. It happened at the worst times. In public. With my dad.” I was becoming very confessional. Tony would be proud of me. I had never told anyone this. “After a while it went away. This thing—it’s nothing. You’ll beat the ladder. I got better—you will, too.”

“Look at yourself. You call that better?” We laughed. I rubbed my face. He belched and I smelled chlorine. We shook hands, nodding at each other. On my way out, my heart went cold as I passed Duke Troth, the bigot from the Thayer Hotel. Against my own admonition, I had forgotten about him. What did he want with Pee Wee? Troth looked at me the way dogs look at cats as he entered the ward. Remember him, I said to myself.

I doubted my own skills in swimming, but Mr. Flauck validated me, giving me another shot at scuba training. I wanted to learn what frogmen knew. By now it was November and colder than anything I had experienced in San Francisco. I got golf. Golf was not a sport for a Chinese kid. Chinese people couldn’t get into half the golf courses in San Francisco unless it was to empty the trash.

Mr. McWalters raised his eyebrows at my grades. “You’re good in everything ’cept math. How come?”

“Sir, I am not good at mathematics.”

“Whaddyou mean, you’re not good at math? Aren’t you Chinese?”

“Mr. Ting!” called Captain Dozier.

“Yes, sir!” I stood at attention before his desk, some of the chalk from my badly butchered math problem dusting my gray trou. We recited math problems at large, numbered chalkboards which covered the section walls. We were assigned calculus problems based on staggered boards, odd and even, to avoid inadvertent glances at other solutions. Many of the boards, I was sure, were replete with equations marching in rigid horizontal lines of progressive derivation leading to the notation “Q.E.D.” on the bottom, for
quod erat demonstrandum
, “which was to be demonstrated.”

I had placed a “Q.E.D.” on my board, but there were no
equations of value between my name on top and the Latin initials on the bottom.

“Mr. Ting, this is a routine differential equation. You okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He lowered his voice. “Having trouble at home? Someone sick?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, did you get a ‘Dear John’ letter? Something like that? Or some upperclassman really on your tail—signature calls?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Ting, are you
really
Chinese?” he asked.

“You a virgin?” asked Mr. McWalters. “You’re turnin’ red!”

“Sir, I believe I am,” I said. Clint hadn’t warned me about this question.

“You
believe
you are—what? Turning red, or a virgin?”

“Sir, I do not know if I am a virgin.”

“Whaddyou mean, you don’t know? You mean
you don’t know?
” His roommates looked up.

“No, sir,” I said.

He laughed. “Well, Ting, have you been laid?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Wow, you really are no rocket scientist, are you?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Well, I never figured
you
for a goat. You’re in top sections in everything but math. All right. Papa McWalters is gonna give you the straight poop: Wet dreams, Mr. Smack, do
not
count. That’s a big negative. They’re not so bad—hell, they’re not scheduled. Prevent white-out, internal drowning. But good as they are, when it’s over, you’re still a bona fide government-issue Virgin, one each, capital V. If you haven’t been laid, you’re a virgin. Now, that’s as good as Webster. You’re eighteen, right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You a
killer
, smackhead?”

“Yes, sir!” I shouted.

“Ever kill anyone, Mr. Ting?” he asked, smiling broadly. “IRP!” he shouted.

“SIR, I DO NOT KNOW!” I cried.

He stared at me. “You wanna explain
that
one? No. As you were: I don’t wanna know. Need a damn encyclopedia for every
friggin’ question I ask you. What are you—a damn Eastern mystic or something?”

13

Golden Gate Park, November 22, 1960

Kennedy had been elected President. Edna, my father, and I heard Kennedy speak at the Cow Palace during the primary. That’s where, after the war, Tony Barraza used to fight in front of adoring fans. Siciliano cries for blood and Piedmontese oaths were so loud that he threw torso-crushing combinations into his opponent in time to their rhythmic chants of “Ti-ger, Ti-ger, Ti-ger!”

“My coach used to fight here,” I said without thinking.

“Hush and keep your mouth closed,” said Edna.

Kennedy had mesmerized the audience. The Irish, Italians, Negroes, Hispanics, Slavs, and Japanese, the Filipinos and the Basques, the Russians and the Jews, and the powerful Cantonese political organization of Chinatown had arrived skeptical of a man so young and so Catholic. By the middle of his speech about a new generation of Americans pledged to a world of idealism and freedom, who would use athletic spirit, vigor, and youth to keep America first in the world, San Francisco was his. He spoke of racial equality, and I had developed a political view.

I was happy as I pitched rocks high over Stow Lake—happy about Kennedy, because he had made it clear that he was a friend of the Negro, and I was sort of a Negro, and I was hopeful that he would like me. I was also happy with my arm. It had been lifting iron for seven years; I could beat everyone except for Toos and Markie in rock throwing for distance.

“Kennedy’s a good man,” Markie T. had said. “Rich white
dude on the side a colored people.” He blew a big bubble of Bazooka gum. “Don’t know why he that way, but he is.”

“Kai,” said Toos as I pitched rocks. “C’mere.”

Jerome “Lucky” Washington was waiting for me. His left eye was puffed, trying to clot from a lot of bleeding. Something very hard had hit him, splitting his lip and canting him to the left. So Leo Washington was back. Leo, the sour-bellied, weather-bitching pool cheat, nocturnal groin kicker, daylight sucker puncher, wife beater, and child stomper, cursed the whole ’hood and could kill you with his breath. He was a mean drinker with hard boots, the ambulatory nightmare of the Pandhandle. Leo was Lucky’s father.

Toos was solemn and I cooled my face. Lucky looked like he had been spit out of an old meat grinder. Early on, if there had been two kids and one of them looked like Lucky did now, it would have been me. But Lucky had foul
yeh
, karma, and I had whipped him in a nighttime fistfight; he wore the tar of being the China boy’s first dunce like a permanent shiner. Now, six years later, as my fortunes rose and his fell, he still had no use for me.