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"Just like when I started school. I could read before I started the first grade, and I knew that no one else could, so when this old bitch starts off with flash cards and the alphabet crap, I raised my hand and asked, "Where are the books?" The class all laughed and giggled, and Miss Minder, who was old and hated kids, probably for good reason, threw a fourth-grade reader in my hands and told me to read and so I read, and when I finished a page, said, "Where are the hard books? This is only a fourth-grade reader." All the kids laughed and Miss Minder almost cried she was so mad, and I thought I was going to be the leader of the band. But I quickly discovered that nobody liked me because I could read and they couldn't, and then they didn't like me because I made good grades. So for the next eight years, until it became all right to be smart, I was the dirtiest, dumbest kid in school. On purpose." He paused as four jets roared over then settled like fat mallards against the runways.
"Always had trouble with my head, man. But in high school I let it go; it was enough to be able to do it. It was like football: when the coaches tried to teach me how to throw a pass, tried to change the way I threw a pass, I couldn't pass for shit, but my way, I could do it. Finally they left me alone, and I just threw the goddamned ball. But then that got to me too. Somehow I wasn't throwing the ball, somebody else was. Or maybe it was more like having a machine in my head that plotted trajectories and found ranges and figured windage and force vectors and triggered the muscles. I always felt left out of the process."
"No," I interrupted, taking the cigarette he offered, "you are the process."
"Aw, bullshit, that's no good. I'm not part, if I don't feel like I'm part, huh? No.
"Then," he said, pausing to light up, his face fired by the match, crimson like the hot exhausts of the jets coming over our heads, "Then at Carlton I found out something. The hard way." He laughed, but it sounded more like a snort. "I was making it with this chick, this good chick, down in Madison. A good kid but, Jesus, a bad scene. I was drunk most of the time, and mad at her most of the time for reasons I still don't understand. Maybe because she made me happy, maybe for no reason at all. But I'd get mad, madder than hell, then I'd tear her into little pieces. I made fun of her Church, her meatless Fridays – here's a piece of meat for this Friday, I'd say – her family, her friends, then I'd screw her and make her cry with passion, then laugh at her hypocritical tears, as I called them." He nicked his cigarette over the fence, then walked back into the shadows next to the building.
"But she loved me, man, and she hung on, though God knows why. All the way. Until one really bad night when I was drunk, blind, stupid, black-out drunk, laying on the floor of her apartment, beating my head on the tiles, keeping time to the music from the beer joint below. I busted my head all up and bled all over the place, broke furniture and all that kind of shit. And that was all right; but I wouldn't stop it with the head, beating away, and she couldn't stop me, and I wouldn't stop until I finally drank and battered myself into oblivion." He lit another cigarette. His face was as tired as his voice in the quick light.
"Then the next morning she said, very calmly, very plainly, that this was too much. "Too much, Joe,' she said. 'You hate yourself too much. Either I'll get lost when you get your head and heart together, or else I'll get torn up in the fight. That's too much,' she said.
"I hated losing her," he said, looking up at me, "and I gave her all the horseshit about being afraid to live and too ignorant to die, which was just true enough to really hurt – I seem to know weak spots naturally, too – but I sort of understood something about myself, why I'd been beating my head on the floor. I hated it, pure and simple, and in spite of my new attempts at being an intellectual, I hated my head because it wasn't part of me. It has always felt like somebody's head besides mine, and I didn't understand, and I hated. She didn't understand either, but she knew enough to get the hell out of the way. Enough." He stopped talking again, and a jet engine being tested filled the silence with a steady, grating roar which seemed to rise out of the very night itself. Something was waiting in the darkness, an animal, a beast, all mouth and desire, growling, eating the very darkness, dissatisfied with the night.
"So what the hell did you want?" he said suddenly, shaking his head.
"I thought I wanted to beat your damned head in. But I guess I… I guess not. Let's go in before that noise makes idiots of us all. Stay cool. Lt. Dottlinger is after your ass; he knows that you were the organizer of the mutiny."
Morning started to say something, stopped, then said, "Don't sweat it. I can take my own licks. If he wants me so much I may let him have all of me." A rice bug, a pale cockroach-looking, flying beast as big as your thumb, crawled along the sidewalk, stu
"He's smarter than you think, and he's drowning, Joe and he'll hurt you. He knows how to do that, if nothing else " I said, pausing at the door.
"You should know," he said, gri
"Not if you keep setting me up for the kill," I said, smiling too.
Inside I shouted something about the Trick calling me if they needed to go to the latrine because after tonight it was obvious that they couldn't pee without it ru
"Hey, I'm ah… I'm…" he tried to say.
"Next time you want to get in some close order drill, tell me. I'll arrange it."
"Don't do us any favors," Morning said as I left.
It was over for now, and I enjoyed the cool peace of the night on my way back.
But, God, it's never over. The finger of God is never satisfied always moving, always rewriting life, always making a scene go on and on until even He must cry, "God, will it never end," even as His finger moves on.
"Where are they at?" Tetrick shouted at me as he came in the Orderly Room the next morning. Red splotches of frustration interrupted the yellow of his face. "You've got to be kidding me? Say it ain't so. Get 'em in here, Krummel, now. Every one of them." I managed between flying arms and screams to get him into Saunders' office. "Whatever you're go
"No," I said.
"What do you mean, no?" he shouted.
"They're my trick. You said so. I took care of it. You hang them, you hang me."
"I should hang myself. How could they do a thing like that? The Lieutenant will kill us all," he said.
"He'll never know."
"He knows everything. He has a spy system better than the CIA. God," he groaned, rubbing his shining head, "what's next? No, don't tell me. I couldn't stand it."
"Football season is next. Three weeks, then all the anger can go somewhere else." I felt as if I should comfort him, maybe pat his shoulder, because he really did care about his troops. I'd never seen anybody like Tetrick before.
"Football, huh? Maybe you will all get killed." He shuffled out as fast as his feet would let him. I followed. Dottlinger was standing in the middle of the door waiting for someone to call "Attention." Dottlinger gave "At ease" his usual arrogant inflection, which made it mean exactly the opposite: "Don't relax a second," it said. He raised an eyebrow as if to ask what we had been doing in Saunders' office, but he didn't ask; he had other things on his mind; he was next.