Honor and Duty (60 page)

“He got real pissed when I didn’t do it right.”

Mike smiled, nodding. “Yeah, I know that one.”

“It was real important that I get it right. Your dad do that to you?”

“Until I got smart,” he said.

“Well, I never got smart.”

“But you liked math until he tutored you?”

I gazed at the river. “Never told anyone this before.” I looked down at my hands, rubbing against each other. No sparks came out; no answers were writ in the sky. “I sort of went crazy. I was hard to teach. Stupid. It drove my dad sort of nuts. The funny thing is,
I
went crazy.”

“What do you mean, ‘crazy’?” he asked.

“Crazy. Abnormal, insane, nuts, crazy. Psychotic, or something. Worse than neurotic. I had laughing fits. I couldn’t stop laughing.” My words floated over the river, toward watching gods.

I had always known the insanity god had more to do with mathematics than was commonly understood.

My father presented bewildering geometry and trig problems. He looked at me the way cynics study palm readers, suspecting the absence of competence. I would look at these carefully drawn figures, knowing that they were one part graphite and two parts blood from his brain. These were very important sheets, very important diagrams. To me, they were gobbling gibberish, what Toos called rank jive.

My father would describe the problems with his unique English, and I would reply in my personal mutation of the language, neither of us understanding the other, neither willing to express truth. The truth was he feared that I was endemically stupid, while my truth was I could do little but fear him.

I was blind with it. I was the classic citizen of China, listening to the emperor, who echoed, “
Lin tsun
, tremblingly obey.” I had mastered the trembling part.

My math never met his expectations. The hurt, frustration, and even fear that flowed from my math errors stoked angers in him that could melt coke and iron in the forges of hell. They made me weep at the sight of his face.

The worse I was with his problem sets, the angrier he became.

“Study math now,” he said in his deep voice, and my heart would sink into the nether regions of my body, never sure when it was safe to return. We walked down the dark hall to the kitchen. I would not have been surprised to find a guillotine installed atop the old table. Here, my brain and my soul had been examined, again and again, and been found wanting.

“You are born with your character,” said Edna. “Boys cannot change. Girls can, and do.”

Uncle Shim agreed. “She is most wise for a foreign person. It is true. You are born with your gifts. You cannot order more talents from Heaven.” My lack of talents caused madness.

The passing of my mind was witnesssed by the isosceles triangle and cosine function questions that marched across my father’s fragile graph papers. Until this night, I had not known of the existence of the insanity god. He arrived at our kitchen table at my moment of greatest need. I did not understand the trig problem and was in the midst of the solution, making sucking noises with my mouth while wildly guessing at a host of unlikely answers. I was ten and had been angering my father for three years, coinciding roughly with my resistance to his second wife. I feared I would not see eleven.

In the midst of abject fear, something made me look up, into the light fixture that hung from the ceiling. It was very bright, and from it came a small and playful spirit that moved inside my stomach and forced from me a silly laugh.

A son, laughing at his father. During a test. Me, dumbest Chinese kid in the world, laughing at my father. The sound of it stopped my father’s hand. Again, the spirit forced out a laugh, heartier, fuller, more spirited than the first. It was neither mocking nor triumphant, but ludicrous, jumping with primitive hilarity, possessed of cosmic power and acting without fear. I laughed with the force of guffawing village clowns braying in tearful exuberance. I laughed from stomach, mouth, brain, and heart, from pancreas and thorax. I was a herd of hee-hawing elephants, crying until sheets of tears ran down my face and stained my shirt and my pants, leaving big salty drops on the delicate graph paper with their foreign symbols.

I saw my father staring at me in surprise, horror, and fear.

“Stop!” he cried. “STOP NOW!”

I couldn’t. Father no longer owned me; the insanity god had taken possession of my simple mind. Uncle Shim would say I
could no more stop the laughter than a man could embrace smoke.

This did not stop the tutoring, but my father sat one chair farther away from me at the table, and no longer lost his temper physically in the face of my continuing mathematical stupidities.

There was no joy in escaping the bad temper I caused in my father. But I was powerless to beckon or dismiss this immature little spirit that knew nothing of my great rock, the heavy duty, the
shiao
, I bore to my father and all that he was. When I laughed without joy, the rock rolled away from me, and I watched my fate darken with a heart that struggled to beat.

I tried once to say it was okay that he had tried to form from me the intellectually heroic structure of a math prodigy, but I lacked the courage, and could not find words—only the riff of stumbling speech. When I turned thirteen and began to grow, the tutoring stopped. I had mixed feelings. Hard as tutoring was, it was what we did together.

Through his furies and losses and sadness, he was not venting his life’s disappointments on me. I was, however, one of them.

“Mike, my dad discovered I was really an idiot. When
I
found out, I think I went nuts, by laughing.” I blew out air. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Cold Max,” said Mike. Leigh “Cold Max” McSon.

“What about him?”

“I could’ve beaten him. He went on to win Brigade, but I pinned him in Yearling year.” Mike’s knee was pumping.

“I remember that.” I was glad Mike was talking to the left and to the right, and not on that other topic. Cold Max and I had been roommates as Yearlings. “Mike, Cold Max was so angry, he spat. He talked like Donald Duck for weeks. You know—‘Holy smokes, how’d that turkey beat me?’ ” I said in my best Donald Duck imitation.

Mike laughed. “Kai, I had him in the last match.”

I remembered. Mike was up, 10-1. He could only lose by being pinned, which hadn’t happened once at the Academy—and Cold Max pinned Mike with fifteen seconds left. Mike was out of the Brigade finals. I had cheered for both of them, wanting both to win and neither to lose.

“Bad luck,” I said.

Mike shook his head. “Don’t believe in bad luck anymore.

We have inner motivations—hidden op orders—that unconsciously dictate what we do. Omens are road signs that give us clues about the motivations. Like, when you sit down with your Juice assignments,” said Mike, “do you see your father in front of you?”

Back to that. “Do you?” he said.

I shook my head and looked down at my tennis shoes.

“I can’t believe you’re not aware of him. This whole place is filled with sons of ambitious fathers. We’re all platforms for their hopes, their ambitions. West Point is a father’s totem.”

“I don’t see him in front of me, Mike.” I let out a lot of air. “He’s above me. And he’s behind me. That’s where Chinese fathers stand. In our pasts, guiding the future.”

“Just before Cold Max took me down,” Mike said, “I thought of Dad. How pissed he’d be if I got pinned when I was up so many points.” He licked his lips, sprang up, and paced.

“Here’s the hard part. See, we’re supposed to be number one, beat the hell out of everyone. Smartest, toughest, fastest. Dads teach that. West Point gives you letters, stars, and patches for being the best, for beating everyone, for developing the habits of victory.”

I nodded. ‘Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory.’ It was a MacArthurism.

“But Kai, fathers are—they’re like gods. You can’t, shouldn’t beat them. Best them. Be the best, but don’t beat Dad.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“It makes sense if you’re doing something your dad couldn’t do. My dad was a great runner. Lousy wrestler.”

“But my dad’s an engineer. Good at math,” I said.

“But he was an immigrant, like my grampa. Your dad couldn’t come here. This was the unattainable dream for them.”

I didn’t like the argument. “Naw,” I said.

“I don’t know, Kai. Dad’s still as big in my mind as West Point. I keep getting them mixed up.”

I looked at the chapel, the hard hills, the granite buildings. They stood above us. They were so huge, so inescapable, casting long shadows, so damnably old, reaching back, behind us. The Hanlin, older than time; Himalayan peaks, embracing clouds.

“West Point’s the biggest freaking father in the world,” he said. “I hate to lose. I mean, I
hate
to lose,” he growled. “But I lost that match—the most important in my life—when I had it won. Just before Cold Max hit me, I had a feeling I shouldn’t win.”

“Okay. So you had a random thought that distracted you. That’s all that was. Bad luck.”

He shook his head. “Look at you. You love West Point more than the rational mind should permit. You
love
it. I don’t. You do. You’re a permanent corporal and the darling of the tac. You got friends in all the regiments and departments—even in
Juice.
Maher wants to adopt you. You’re popular. Friends with Schwarzhedd. Everyone’s buddy and good to Plebes, the only squad leader who’s prepared his boys for Buckner. You joke all the time, never down, always cheering up the ones who
are
down. People love that. You never complain, except about Juice. You’d be perfect if you didn’t eat off of other people’s plates.”

I smiled, but Mike was intently serious. “You’re crazy about West Point. And you might flunk out. And you’re in this wrestling match with your dad, over math.”

Major Schwarzhedd asked me to meet him in the West Point Room on the fourth floor of the USMA Library on a Saturday afternoon.

He smiled and sat in a gray chair, a gift from an earlier class. “What do you think of these Immortals?” he asked, pointing to the portraits of Edgar Allen Poe and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

“I guess they weren’t meant to be Grads, sir,” I said.

“Do you think you are?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said.

Major Schwarzhedd stood, his size casting shadows from the bright portrait spotlights onto the dark-wood table, “You belong here. You love what the Academy stands for. Idealism. Service. Honor. You’re not one of them,” he said, waving at Poe and Whistler.

“Not entirely bad company, sir,” I said.

“No question about their talent, but Poe was troubled.”

I nodded. Cadet Poe had trooped out with the Corps for a Saturday parade and had marched off stark naked, without any of his clothes, which he left hanging like a scarecrow’s costume, on his rifle, bayoneted into the Plain.

“Both he and Whistler were answering other calls. They weren’t soldiers. They didn’t leave here to wear the uniform without lieutenant’s bars.” I thought of Marco Matteo Fideli’s gold bar in my valuables box. “You’re a soldier, Kai. You care about your people. If they got hurt, you’d wear the scar.

“Use your talent. Remember Napoleon at Austerlitz, and Norm Cota on Omaha Beach, Dowding during the Battle of Britain, Chamberlain at Gettysburg. They almost lost, but when the skies were darkest, they rallied to win the day. They never lost faith.”

He leaned on the chair, his shoulders swelling. “Make sure you do the same.” He smiled, his face animated, brightening the whole room. “Why do you think I’ve spent time with you this year?” Marco Fideli had asked me that question. Marco had picked me out because I frowned.

“Sir, you were badly oversupplied in hot dogs and popcorn, and needed someone to help reduce inventory.”

“We all face our special lessons. There’s a little bit of you in all of us. Wanting to be special, also wanting to be just like everyone else. Being good at some things, bad at others. You are unnaturally poor in math, but have a good grasp of history.” He smiled. “I love history. All our lessons are in it.

“Your father really wanted you here, didn’t he?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“My father never dictated my future,” he said. “I had two noble professions to consider—the ministry, which is what my grandfather followed, or the military, my father’s calling. Both require leadership. The military art, though, spoke to my soul.”

He stood by the window, his hands joined behind his back. “I wanted to be a general of a great army, filled with all the men of the earth, facing an implacable foe of ultimate and unreasoning evil in a noble war. It would be the dedication and belief of our troops against the hate and acquisitive greed of the enemy, and it would be my military art, that I learned here, at West Point, against the enemy general. We would have to win, and I would have a chance to serve truly.

“I would feint him, confuse him with rages of doubts and bouts of confidence, and envelop him. It would be the second of August, 216 years before Christ, again, at Cannae on the Aufidus River, ten miles inland from the Adriatic, and he would be destroyed, utterly.”

I knew Cannae. Hannibal’s masterful, unmatched battle of total annihilation in which his polyglot, multiethnic army out-maneuvered
the massive, better-trained Roman legions of Paulus and Varro. Cannae changed warfare for two millennia by placing maneuver and tactics above mechanical discipline and redundant drill.

He sighed. “But the age of the great campaigns is past. If we fight one of those huge, sprawling wars, it’ll be the end of us all.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “Wanting to be a Great Captain, I’m an Infantry officer in an era of brush and guerrilla wars, wars of national liberation where remarkable patriots fight on both sides. It’s unfamiliar terrain. Our country’s fighting itself, burning its own cities and debating the war while the government commits the troops, one by one. It’s the best of times, and the worst of times, to be an American infantryman.”