Testimony and Demeanor (2 page)

Every night my bunkmate—Demry McGlaughlin was his name—asked me softly, “Is anything wrong, man?”

“No,” I said. It startled me every time.

What was wrong was—perhaps was—that I knew I made up so much of each day and yet I felt the shadow of all their minds pass over it. I did not know whether they were drawn into my imagination or whether I was drawn into seeing what they saw. Whichever it was, it was a great strain. To be sure, when they slept I was released. As soon as they closed their eyes, I felt the bloat of my authority subside. I was alone, and I saw only what concerned me. I alone saw the moon shine on the white foot powder on the floor, as soft as flour on a pantry table. I saw the moonlight—on the pronged silver knob of the drinking fountain, gleaming hard at a great distance from my open eye. In the morning I felt good. I used to sing as I bloused my fatigue pants. Once someone said behind my back, “What’s he singing about—all the crap he’s gonna give us?”

I said out loud without turning, “I don’t think you’ve
thought very carefully about what you said. The chair gives you leave to reconsider.”

Usually I ignored who said what. There were so few freedoms for them that I thought they should at least have the freedom of speech. The only way they could be sure of it was by my perfect impartiality, and perfect impartiality is ignorance.

Demry chuckled. He was the only one in the barracks appreciably bigger than I.

I favored him. Otherwise I was fair. I favored him not because he was the biggest, nor because he was a Negro, but because he was the first to emerge. I saw him speaking to me and heard him, both at once.

In general, my reaction to the swell of voices within the barracks was like the sort of puzzlement one has watching a flock of birds, hearing them call to each other but being unable to associate a particular call with a particular bird. As a consequence I could never address anyone by name unless he was wearing a clean name tag and happened to be standing within reading distance and facing me. However, on several occasions I called the roll at assembly entirely from memory. But I knew Demry. Demry was like a large crow flapping along from tree to tree in plain sight, cawing down at me, sometimes companionably, sometimes derisively, but always clearly. That may have been because he seemed to be humoring me. He laughed quite a lot.

What I said fell heavily on the others. I sometimes would say whatever I was thinking and it dismayed them, especially since the first sergeant often appeared to tell them that he stood behind whatever
I
told them. Thus, a number of lyric and scientific observations became curiously embedded in my impersonation of a sergeant, the whole batch of which was repeatedly stamped with approval by the first sergeant. I could also say “Inspick
SHUNNN
 … 
HAR
ums!” Click. Click. Clickety-click.
“You min
will
do that again and you min
will
do it
ERRIGHT
!” as well as some other things along that line.

But those were only the ornaments and accidents of my efforts; the substance was plain and just. Their hours in the barracks were arranged on concentric cardboard wheels that I set each morning after breakfast. In the field the first sergeant’s voice reached us all on every main question. I believed no one had reason to complain.

Yet there was fighting. The first time it was two very small people. Demry held one and I the other. We put them under the shower. The second time it was somewhat larger people, but after a blow had been struck on each side someone saw a plump nurse from the dental clinic walking slowly past the barracks. The crowd rushed to line the roads. The two men fighting became puzzled, and then alarmed. They left off fighting. One man—not one of the two—went on sick call with a swollen knee. He had been pushed down the wooden steps on the way out.

Sometimes things happened quickly. But mostly time was quicker. The usual day would be half gone before anything of substance came along. We moved very slowly from point to point—both while walking and while learning our rudiments. There was a special stillness about the faces and postures of all the people in the company—gathered outside the mess hall, inside a classroom, on the roadside—that gave me the feeling that they had been told they were being used as models for a laborious and richly detailed mural painting. Even when we were marching it seemed so—especially in the woods when a bird or a squirrel would appear and disappear at a natural speed. There was so much time passing that I could watch the sun’s shadow move from one side of a nose to the other. But sometimes things happened quickly. One late afternoon we left the company formation, trooped through the barracks, and were seated outside cleaning rifles before the dust had settled
on the assembly area, a hundred yards away, visible from the wooden steps of our side porch. A few people stayed inside, but most of the platoon, stripped to their white T-shirts, were gathered on the ground in groups of three or four, their dog tags clanking gently as they slowly moved their forearms about, pulling apart their rifles with the peaceful rhythm of sheep tugging at clumps of grass. I went inside to drink at the water fountain. Demry was sitting on his bunk. I heard Ellridge ask him for the bore cleaner. Demry ignored him. He asked again. Demry said, “You’ll get it. You’ll get it. Just get off my back, boy.”

Ellridge giggled loudly. I was surprised.

“Something funny?” Demry said. “You think that’s funny? You go on and
tell
me what’s funny, boy.”

Ellridge said, “Oh,
you
know.” His eyelids drooped almost languidly. But when he looked up again his eyes were wide, his mouth parted, and his cheeks sucked in with fear. I began to see the point about “boy.” It was astonishing how quickly they had come to the point, without a word of elaboration, without having anything else in common. Even so, I would have thought Demry was being overly subtle, but I could see Ellridge’s response of coyness and panic. And there
is
something about ineptness—ineptness at daring as well as ineptness at flight—that arouses loathing and aggression.

“You better say something, boy,” Demry said.

Ellridge looked over at me and gave another nervous laugh. “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said to Demry.

There were ten men in from the steps before Ellridge finished answering. They loved a fight. They probably smelled it when he opened his mouth the first time. We hadn’t had a real fight for a week. Demry got up and moved toward Ellridge. The men moved closer until they were packed tight in a ring. They knew I was behind them and that I was supposed to break it up. More men came in and squeezed around.

It was disgusting how terrified Ellridge looked. I was surprised
when he began to move his mouth again and said, with great effort, “I don’t have to talk to you.” It was like a turtle laying eggs—a quick nervous convulsion for each word, the eyes blinking slowly, out of phase with the movements of his mouth.

Ellridge backed up, but then he laughed again. The laugh was out of control and dragged up an ugly whimper at the end. He hiccuped. It would have been funny except for Demry’s bulk leaning forward. Ellridge’s hands flew out to steady himself. One hand against the wall, the other against the rifle rack.

Demry said, “I’m gonna make you quit laughing, boy.”

One of the men in the front row called out, “He’s not gonna fight him—he’s gonna rape him!”

Attacked by their laughter, Ellridge pulled an M-1 from the rack. For an instant I was afraid he might have smuggled a cartridge back from the range, but he came to a kind of high port arms and said, “Don’t you come near me—I’ll split your head.” He waggled the butt of the rifle. Demry grabbed an end of the iron locking bar and pulled it out of the last slot, from which it had been jutting askew. It trailed by his foot for an instant. He seemed to swing it lightly, but the rifle jumped two feet in the air. Ellridge jumped back into the corner as it fell. There was a notch in the side of the stock in front of the trigger housing. I’d hate to think it was the sight of damage to government property that moved me, but it was then that I pushed aside the people in front of me. I called to Demry. He turned.

“He’s a good deal smaller than you are,” I said. “You could break him into pieces. You know that. But we couldn’t put him back together, you know.…”

Demry looked at me meditatively.

“Do you want him to apologize?” I asked.

“No,” he said, and handed me the locking bar. He walked back to his bunk, sat down, and held the barrel of his rifle up to his eye, pointing the other end at the window as though he were looking at the sky with a telescope.

“Get out,” I said to the others. They really were terrible bloodsuckers sometimes.

“Not you,” I said, somewhat unnecessarily, to Ellridge, who was still standing in the corner. The others sluggishly passed out the double door. Ellridge put the rifle back and followed me out the front door. We went around to the furnace-room side of the barracks. I leaned against the side of the building, wondering for a moment what people thought of Ellridge where he came from. Did life there go on in such simple harmony that it didn’t matter what they thought—that whatever he was was all that anyone hoped for him? Leave him to his same old tune. Or were people there distressed at weakness too? He should at least try to turn out all right. He stood facing me. When I finally spoke, he suddenly checked the buttons to the flaps of his shirt pockets.

I said, “It might seem unfair to you but I wish you would stay away from McGlaughlin. Don’t talk to him. Don’t get in his way. In fact, don’t even put yourself next to him in formation.”

“It was the colored boy started it.”

“His name is McGlaughlin,” I said. “And who started it doesn’t matter. This is just to maintain the peace—like the United States keeping Chiang Kai-shek from overrunning China.”

But that was just part of my old tune. He didn’t listen to it.

“They said it would be a lot worse,” he said softly. “Back home they said that.”

“It’s not so bad, then,” I concluded hopefully. “And it should get better for all of us. It’s not so long now.”

I also defended them. One night, long after lights out, a newly assigned member of the company cadre intruded. At that time he held the rank of specialist fourth class. When I woke up, he
was shining a flashlight on a pile of foot powder on the floor and demanding that it be swept up.

I got out of bed and went over. Ellridge was sleepily refusing to get up, and the specialist, whose name was Shoemaker, brayed at him more and more noisily.

“Jesus, Ellridge, why is it always you?” I said. “Never mind, never mind.…”

“You get back in the rack,” Shoemaker said, shining the light in my eyes.

I put my hand over the lens, saying, “Don’t shine the light in my eyes.”

“Don’t get lively, Bonzo. You’re in the Army now. You touch me and they’ll lock you up.”

“You’re making an awful lot of noise. Why don’t you step outside and discuss sweeping the floor in the morning?”

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“He’s the sergeant,” Ellridge said.

“The hell he is,” Shoemaker replied.

“I have field stripes, I think they’re called.”

“Field rank don’t mean diddly, Bonzo.”

“Doesn’t,” I said. “But I think it does.”

“You come with me,” Shoemaker insisted. “You come with me and you’ll find out what’s what.” I turned to get my clothes. “You just come as you are. You won’t get frostbite.”

I ignored him. He turned back to Ellridge. “That better be off the floor when I get back.”

He followed me down to my end of the barracks and, while I dressed, took the lid off the trash barrel. “This place is a pigsty,” he said, peering in. He shone his light on Demry in the lower bunk. “You go dump this in the dumpster.” Demry rolled over. I pulled my boots on without lacing them and went out the side door. Shoemaker followed me; he didn’t want me to get to Sergeant Plisetsky first. Yet when we got to the HQ he didn’t want to be the one to wake him. He invited me to. I declined.

“They’re going to crucify you,” he said. He put his flashlight down on the desk sharply. Then he pulled open a drawer and dropped it in. Sergeant Plisetsky rolled onto his back, crossed his forearms on his stomach like flippers, and exhaled at length. He looked very comfortable. Shoemaker opened a drawer very quietly. He took up a pencil and, looking up at my name tag several times, wrote my name down on a note pad.

“I’ve got your name,” he said, tapping it with his forefinger.

“Well done!” I said.

“I’ve had about enough out of you, Bonzo. Now get out. Get out of here before I put my boot so far up your ass you won’t be able to tell shit from Shinola.”

I put my finger to my lips and nodded toward the sleeping First Sergeant.

Shoemaker contrived a number of small inconveniences immediately after that. I think he held up some mail for a while. For example, my weekly tin of Danish cigars was late, and a little stale. But, without becoming threatened directly, he was cured of being a bother at night.

It suddenly turned cold two days before we went on our bivouac. I liked the feel of the ground turning hard. I’d never been so constantly exposed to the countryside during a change of season. In the same cubic yard of air that was warm one afternoon you could see your breath the next. The C.O.’s jeep took a wrong turn when wheel ruts in what had been simply a damp intersection became as intransigent as railroad switches. The leaves on the ground were no longer soft and colored but shriveled up, in plain brown rigor mortis. Dull as wrapping paper. It was the evergreens that grew darker and richer. And the stars grew brighter, especially as the moon waned.

We pitched our tents in rows on top of a ridge. The iron tent pegs were the only ones that went in successfully. There was a good deal of muttering when I asked those with iron pegs
to share them with those with wooden ones, so they could at least start their holes. It was as though the cold withered their small patches of generosity as it had the leaves. Of course, most of them were sick too. When the weather changed, First Sergeant Plisetsky had us run, and the sweat chilled on them when they would lie down during the breaks.