'You had me thinking, this pledge is going to change your mind about admissions policy, Captain. In a couple of days, he snaps off a salute could shatter a brick. Trims his uniform like a West Point grad. In a week, memorized the Reg Book and
Respectful and well prepared in class. Okay, he had a little problem with his roommate, but these things happen. Fact is, Pledge Squiers is an unrelenting motormouth who should have been paired with a deaf-mute. This new pledge fit in from the moment his shoe leather hit Pershing Quad and is a fine asset to his class. Look at the way he braces those squirts in Infantry! He's a goddamned natural! You know what that young man is?' He pushed himself off the dresser, raised his arms at his sides and gazed upward. 'That young man is officer material!'
'I do my best,' I said.
Captain Squadron canted backward against the dresser and pushed his hands into his pockets. In the mirror, the clean line of a fresh haircut curved above the starched collar of his tan shirt. The dark stubble on his head and his tiny, dented nose made him look like a gas station attendant. 'You're a real piece of work, aren't you?' He smiled exactly as if he had just decided to punch someone in the face.
'I don't follow you, sir,' I said.
'How many friends have you made here? Who are your pals, your asshole buddies?'
I named three or four dullards in my class.
'When was the last time you and one or more of your buddies took the bus into town, caught a movie, had a few burgers, that kind of thing?'
The question meant that he already knew the answer. When we left the grounds we had to sign out in groups. I had taken the bus into Owlsburg once, looked around at the dreary streets, and returned immediately. 'I tend to devote my weekends to study.'
He rocked back and smiled again. 'I'm inclined to think that you have no friends and zero interest in making any. Didn't go home for Thanksgiving, did we? Or over Christmas break.'
'You know I didn't, sir,' I said, beginning to get irritated with the captain's theatrics.
'Christmas is a major, major holiday. It's a rare pledge who doesn't get home for Christmas.'
'I explained that,' I said. 'My folks invited me to go to Barbados with them, but I wanted to spend the vacation studying for the finals.'
He grinned like a wolf. 'Should we go down the hall and call your parents, ask them a few questions?'
Again, he already knew the truth. Squadron had checked on my story. 'Okay,' I said, cursing myself for having succumbed to the temptation of a colorful lie. 'If I got along with my family, would I be here in the first place? It isn't easy to say that your parents hate you so much they won't even let you come for Christmas!'
'Why would they hate their own kid like that?'
'We had misunderstandings,' I said.
He looked up at the ceiling. 'I was so impressed by your conduct that I started to wonder why a young man like yourself had been asked to leave all those boarding schools. Five of them, to be exact. Didn't mesh with what I was seeing. So I looked into your files.' He smiled at me with his smug challenge. 'Damned if I could find anything there but smoke.'
'Smoke, sir?'
'Evasions. 'Bad influence on the school.' 'Antagonistic behavior.' 'Considered threatening.' None of these dildos was willing to get down to the nitty-gritty. You know what that told me?'
'I'm sorry to admit it, but I probably acted like a bully,' I said.
He pretended not to have heard. 'Two things. Put on record, your infractions would bar you from admission anywhere except the state pen. But they couldn't pin anything on you, so they took the easy way out and passed you along.'
'I don't think—'
He held up a hand like a stop sign. 'So far this year, six pledges in Infantry have washed out voluntarily. Normally, it'd be two at most. Over at the infirmary? A rash of broken bones. Once or twice in a normal year, a pledge breaks an arm. Now, they're coming in once a week with broken fingers, broken wrists, broken arms. Concussion. One boy turned out to have internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. How'd he get it? 'I twisted my ankle and fell down the stairs.’ And then there's the case of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. You knew him, didn't you?'
'After a fashion,' I said, meaning that I had known Artillery Pledge Fletcher in a most specific fashion. This was the serious matter I had hoped Captain Squadron would not bring up. An unassuming, scholarly-looking boy with round, horn-rimmed glasses and a rosebud face, Fletcher had forever enriched my life through an ultimately fatal act of courtesy.
•On the Thursday of the week given over to the examinations before the Christmas break, I had seen him immersed in a book at a long table in the library. The pledges on both sides were also reading books from stacks piled in front of them, and it was not until the second time I looked at them that I noticed what was different about Fletcher. The others were taking notes on the contents of volumes of military history, but Fletcher was perusing, apparently for his own entertainment,
When he stood up, I collected my things and rushed alongside him. Yes, he said, he would be happy to loan me the book after he had finished reading it. He surrendered it for inspection with the comment that it was 'really spooky.' Fletcher had no idea of the accuracy of his description. Emitting a series of pulsations, the little tract shivered in my hands. It was like gripping a hummingbird.
During the following day, roughly half the pledges, those finished with exams, left campus in wave upon wave of family cars. Fletcher's last final, chemistry, took place on Saturday at the same hour as mine, military philosophy. However, Fletcher assumed that I had already left school, and at five-thirty on Friday afternoon, while on his way to Mess Hall, entered my room without pausing to knock. He found me in, so to speak.
Until my delivery into Fortress Military Academy, the struggles to continue my real education had been largely unrewarded. I needed privacy, and even when I managed to secure a safely uninterrupted hour or two, my efforts had advanced me little beyond what I had already attained. Now I see that weary lull largely as a matter of physical maturation. A developmental spurt had added two inches and twenty pounds to my frame before my admission to the world of close-order drills, and by the time Pledge Fletcher charged in with the sacred book, I was making my first baby steps toward Moveless Movement, whatever it's called, disappearing from one place and turning up in another.
As ever, a paradox is involved, namely that until it becomes second nature the muscular capacity demanded by this stunt gets in the way of doing it. By Christmas break of that year I had succeeded in shifting myself across the four feet from the edge of my cot to my desk chair by means of a sweaty interlude during which I was neither in one place or the other but in both, imperfectly. Whatever that looked like while it was happening is what Fletcher saw when he barged into my room. I can't even guess. My bowels churned, and someone was driving a railroad spike into my head. What I was able to see in the midst of the clamor increased my distress. Two uniformed pledges charged in through two different doors. A swarm of glittering light and my considerable physical distress rendered the invader or invaders visible only in silhouette form as he or they abruptly ceased to move.
From the cot, I saw one of them freeze in front of the open door. From the slightly clearer, closer perspective of the chair, I saw a uniformed torso and waist come to rest beside the door's dark green panel. From both positions I observed the bright dust jacket of the book in my visitor's hand, and both the me on the cot and the me in the chair experienced a surge of demand. Our attempt at an order commanding the pledge to stay put produced the sibilant hiss of a needle striking the grooves of a 78-rpm record. The pledge couldn't have moved if he had wanted to—the kid was glued to the floor.
An endless second later, I was seated beside the immobilized Artillery Pledge Fletcher as glowing sparks fell and died in the air, especially around the end of the cot. I was stark naked and, despite the red-hot agony in my head and the tumult in my guts, brandished the sort of obdurate erection known at Fortress as 'blue steel.' Artillery
