The Lords of Discipline (33 page)

Every night, the campus of the Institute would reverberate with the lion’s roaring. If it was early enough, the cadets would sometimes roar back at him, beginning a strange exchange of messages between prisoners, two thousand captive boys sending greetings to the lonely beast surrounded by pigeons and flowers and raccoons in the park. But usually the lion would only sound his alarums in the deep of night.

The lion moved me deeply, but I loved the train. It passed through my dreams at 11:42 every night and at different times it had passed through malarial jungles, arguments with my mother, the slopes of mountains, the gardens of Annie Kate, the glooms beneath the Atlantic—it rumbled through my dreams each night at the exact same time and I am sure I would have known it if some accident had derailed it somewhere along the desolate tracks that cut through the marshes of the lowcountry and it had failed to come. It was always on time and that made it a good train to run through the campus of a military college.

Throughout the dry season of September, I missed the sounds of the lion and the train and never once remembered them forcing their way into my consciousness. I was trying to think things out alone. Poteete’s name was never mentioned in the barracks. Like a cadet expelled for an honor violation, he became anathema and his memory was erased as though he had never existed, as though he had never stepped outside the rail on fourth division, as though he had not hung from his belt as we lay sleeping in the barracks. I thought about him constantly and tried to bury him in my own mind, tried to speak with him and ask his forgiveness for something neither one of us could help. It was part of my blazing egomania that I felt personally responsible for all the injustices of the Institute. Later, I would feel the same sort of impotent outrage when I studied the monstrous injustices of the world toward its meekest and most helpless citizens. I was young then, and my youth permitted me to believe that I could change the world if only I could devise a cunning enough strategy.

In those dry and cloudless days, solitude was a sweet water running through the fields of me, and I spoke with Poteete without the help of my roommates, my train, or my lion in the park. Alone, I was learning to think in my own way and growing confident in my ability to discriminate between an idea that was for me and one for all the rest. I had my own system of justice that sprang from the center of me. I felt I had a power—or a weakness, I could not be sure—given to very few human beings. I could put myself in the place of others and ask myself how I would feel if I were in their place. I could go out on the rail with Poteete and feel the pull of the concrete beneath me, the liberation that the leap through the air could bring. He lived in my memory and he hung there from his belt, his shadow moving back and forth like an accusation.

There was a time when I thought that I was all green coast and fertile marsh, that my interior lands were bounded by the Appalachian mountains, the skyline of Savannah, the citrus country of central Florida, and the eroded beaches on barrier islands threatened by the moon-swollen tides of the Atlantic. But as I grew older and explored my own starker regions more assiduously, I kept stumbling across pyramids, Mayan campfires, the rubble of Huns—civilizations that had no right of access to the terrain of a Southern boy’s soul. I wanted desperately to find out why I felt different from the other boys at the Institute, why I felt more like Poteete than the rest of them. I wanted to find out why I was lonely and why I never felt lonelier than when I marched with the regiment, in step with the two thousand. When I picked up the yearbook on my desk, flipped through the pages, and looked at the faces of my friends, I thought I was looking at a field guide to ruined boys. That was not true. The Institute had helped many of those boys to find themselves. But as I turned to my own photograph and stared at the immobile smiling stranger who shared my features and my name, I realized that only one boy had been ruined. My task for the year was clear: I had to discover why the boy in that photograph loathed himself so completely and so violently.

On the twelfth day after Poteete died, I heard the lion in the park again. A half-hour later I heard the train rush through the windless Carolina night at 11:42. My senior year began for the second time.

I
t was my habit each evening after mess to walk to the library to check for messages that the black freshman, Pearce, might have slipped into the pages of
The Decline of the West.
On Wednesday night over two weeks after plebe week had ended, I received my first communique from Pearce. Bo Maybank had told me that Pearce had taken the best the E Company cadre could throw at him but the pressure on him was immense and his volatile temper was working against him. If the cadre could get him to throw a single punch at an upper-classman, he would be gone by the next morning. His note was brief and to the point: “Room 2426, after taps. Corporal Turpin and Sergeant Siddons.”

At the library desk, I put in a call to the Bear’s house. The Colonel was inspecting the barracks. Mrs. Berrineau told me she would tell him I had called when he returned.

I walked back across the parade ground beneath the shadows of the massive oak trees on the southern fringe of the parade ground and the two howitzer cannons, Barnwell and Freeman, named for the two Institute cadets who fired the first shots on Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War. The barracks swelled with the violent noise of seventeen cadres in full cry answered by the strained and desperate voices of the six hundred plebes. The noise was official and precisely the same every night. The sweat parties between the evening meal and evening study period had not changed since I was a freshman, and my classmates had proven as gifted in the arts of travail as our cadre had been.

When I entered my room, Reuben Clapsaddle, the six-foot-ten center on the basketball team, was sitting on my desk, talking to Mark and Pig and Tradd about the upcoming basketball season.

“It lives,” Reuben said as I waved at him.

“Sir,” I answered, dropping into my rack and kicking my shoes off onto the floor, “do you have a thyroid condition? You seem awfully tall to me.”

“It even speaks,” Mark said, turning in his chair to face me. “You’ve had a personality like a cup of yogurt for the last couple of weeks. It’s about time you snapped out of it.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Will,” Reuben explained. “Coach Byrum sent me over here to talk to you. He wants to know what happened to the old pep, the old spirit. He thinks you might be going through the change of life.”

“I’m feeling fine, boys,” I said staring at the top bunk. “Give the kid a few days and he’ll come up dancing and singing again.”

“You owe it to the team to snap out of it, Will. If we’re going to go all the way, we’ve got to have you to bring it up the court. That’s what Coach Byrum says.”

“Reuben, thanks for your concern,” I said. “No kidding, I appreciate your coming over here, but this is the fourth year that I haven’t cared about what Coach Byrum thought or said.”

“What a lousy attitude, Will,” Reuben scolded, wagging a giant index finger at me. “Coach is afraid that your negativism will affect the team. If he was so worried about your goddam negativism then why in the hell did he make you captain of the fucking team?”

“Don’t use that word in front of my girl, Clapsaddle,” Pig said, solemnly pointing to the photograph on his desk. “You didn’t know she was listening, but don’t let it happen again.”

Pig’s eyes had glazed over with that feral, gauzy look he assumed whenever he invoked the image of Theresa in front of sacrilegious strangers in the room.

“What word?” Reuben exclaimed. “What are you talking about, Pig? That’s why you’re depressed, Will. You room with the honey prince and two muscle-bound Yankees with funny ideas and funny last names.”

“Do you think my last name is funny, Reuben?” Mark said, rising to his feet. “You mean someone named Clapsaddle thinks that Santoro sounds funny?”

“Clapsaddle,” Pig said. “It sounds like a donkey with gonorrhea.”

“Reuben was joking, Mark,” I said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Santoro is a beautiful name,” Mark said to Reuben, ignoring me. “Don’t you think so, Reuben?”

Reuben felt the climate of menace in the room, and I saw him look to me with luminous, fearful eyes for help. Reuben was one of those huge athletes who take their physical superiority for granted and often find themselves astonished and afraid when challenged by smaller, more violent men. When a man is six feet ten inches tall, he never has to learn the skills of self-defense. Being among the largest men on the planet, Reuben had never had to throw a punch in anger. Pig and Mark knew this instinctively the first time they met him.

“Santoro is one of the prettiest names I ever heard, Mark,” Reuben said, slapping him playfully on the back. “Goddam, boy, that name is pure poetry.”

Tradd was sitting at his desk in the alcove with his back toward the rest of us, filling a fountain pen with ink. The pen made squeaking respiratory noises. Without turning around, he asked in a voice that shivered with hurt, “Why do people call me the honey prince, Reuben?”

All of us turned to look at Tradd. In his corner and with that sad question hovering in the air, he was a portrait of solitude. It was one of those times when I realized that Tradd was one of the most isolated people I had ever known, a boy of such deep essential silences and unvoiced questions I almost felt I had never met or touched him, but only observed him from a distance. I tried to think of a way to answer his question with a joke, but once again humor had lost its adequacy to defuse and mollify.

“It’s because you’re rich, Tradd,” I said finally. “People are always jealous of rich people.”

“You don’t lie very well,” said Tradd.

“Folks think you act funny, Tradd,” Reuben explained. “You ain’t exactly the typical cadet now, are you, boy? You talk funny. You act funny. You walk funny and ya just don’t seem like one of the boys. I’ve never known exactly what it means but it seems to fit you, boy.”

“Only people who don’t know you think it fits you, Tradd,” Mark said, scowling again at Reuben.

“It’s not my fault they think Tradd’s a faggot,” Reuben blustered. “I just heard the name, boys; I didn’t make it up.”

“He didn’t mean that, Tradd,” I said, rolling out of the bed and walking over to Tradd’s desk. “Jocks aren’t known for their overwhelming sensitivity.”

Mark said, “You didn’t make it up, Reuben, and I suggest you don’t let me hear you use that phrase in this room again.”

“We’re brothers in this room, man,” Pig added. “And when you hurt one brother, you hurt all of us.”

“Are you hurt?” Mark asked Tradd gently.

“No, of course not,” Tradd lied.

“Good,” Pig said heartily. “Because if my roommate was hurt, Clapsaddle, I would have to find out why he was hurt, and I would have to hurt the thing that was hurting him, only I’d have to be sure that I hurt that thing much worse than Tradd was hurting. Do you dig, Clapsaddle?”

“Easy, ol’ Pig. Why don’t you use those big muscles to fight that white-haired creep they’re bringing in with the county fair next week? He issued a challenge that no one at the Institute could stay in the ring for five minutes with him. I came over here to talk to Will, to pep the boy up, not to duke it out with my classmates. But I see what the problem is now, Will. Goddam, boy. No wonder you’re depressed. You’re rooming in a goddam insane asylum.”

As he got up to leave Reuben stopped by Pig’s desk near the door and tapped Theresa’s picture frame with a huge lascivious finger. “Nice tits, Pig. Really nice tits,” he said admiringly.

Mark reached Pig before I did, and it was his quickness and presence of mind that saved Reuben from an encounter with Pig that he would not soon have forgotten.

I rushed Reuben out the door, and it was clear from his bewildered expression that he had no idea what law he had broken or rule he had violated in the odd system of jurisprudence practiced in our room.

“It’s a fucking zoo in there, Will,” he said as I hustled him to the stairs. “Why don’t you transfer down to first battalion?”

“Run, Reuben,” I yelled, “do me a favor and run a very fast wind-sprint back to your room and brick yourself in for a week. Pig’s funny about people talking about his girl.”

And Reuben ran, taking the steps leading down to third division four at a time. I watched him as he crossed the quadrangle sally port; he loped along with the graceful, startled gait of a two-legged giraffe.

When I returned to the room, Mark had calmed Pig down. Tradd was studying in the alcove, and Mark was brushing his teeth in the sink by the door.

“Is that giant fruit fly gone?” Mark said, spitting into the sink.

“You basketball jocks are the strangest creatures in this school,” Tradd announced. “The very strangest and that’s the gospel according to the honey prince.”

“You know better than to listen to nicknames, Tradd,” I said. “Good God, we spent our whole freshman year being called douchebags and asswipes.”

“That’s different and you know it, Will. They called
all
of us douchebags.”

“Listen, y’all,” I said, “I’ve caused a lot of pressure in this room in the past two weeks. I was feeling real bad after what happened out there on the division, and I needed time to sort it out in my head.”

Tradd spoke first. “You never have to apologize to your friends, Will. And you should know that. At least those friends who love you even though you’re as peculiar as peculiar can be sometimes.”

“Apologize to me,” Mark demanded. “I think you’ve been a pain in the ass in the past two weeks. I’d rather room with the lion in the park. I want to see the ol’ wise-cracking Will back and running his motor-mouth. I can’t relate to you when you’re not hurting someone’s feelings.”

“I’m back, Mark,” I laughed. “I promise.”

“You’ll feel better after you take those vitamins I left on your desk. Depression is an absence of vitamins, boy. It’s purely physical. I’ve never been depressed in my life.”

“Pig,” I said quietly so the others could study.