“He did. Goodness. He’s a very busy man. And a very nervous man. I almost handed him a combat ration of Valium, he was ticking and twitching up a storm … forget I said that, Slaight.”
“Yessir.” Slaight suppressed a chuckle. Good ole Consor …
“Mr. Slaight, do something for me, will you?”
“Yessir.”
“Let me know what transpires between you and Hedges. I want to know what’s going no. For crying out loud, I don’t even know what’s happened to my autopsy at this point. And after King’s warning, I’m not going asking around. Give me a ring when you’re finished. I’ll be home all evening.”
“Yessir. Will do. Major Consor?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks, sir … I mean … for telling me this stuff.”
“No problem, Slaight. Mister, keep your nose clean in there. And listen up. Understand?”
“Yessir.”
“Speak to you later, then. Good-bye.”
“Bye, sir.”
Irit was standing behind him now, her hands on his shoulders. He could see her reflection in the window across the room. She’d changed into a bright red silk dress, a mini-dress with a skirt with a million pleats, so it seemed to dance and spin with a life of its own as she walked. Her lipstick matched the color of the dress, and Slaight could see her nails, bright red against the khaki of his uniform shirt. He hung up the phone and looked at her. He was tired. It seemed like they’d been up a long time … but only an hour had passed since the call from Hedges.
“What now, Ry?” she asked.
“We’re going to goddamn West Point,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get a move-on.”
15
It was always the goddamn same, every goddamn time, no matter which way you went: in the bus, up Route 9W; in a car, up the Palisades Parkway; you could fly in a goddamn helicopter straight up the Hudson, digging the view of the river, a stewardess serving martinis and peanuts, and it’d still be the goddamn same. It was going back, up to West Point, those final fifty-five miles between New York City and the gate at the end of Main Street in Highland Falls, a grim, depressing trip no matter which way you cut it. Always gave you that feeling … what was it, exactly? … that feeling you had as a kid on the first day of school … a restless churning of the nerves, down in your gut, you didn’t know what to expect, who your teachers were going to be, where your classes were … always afraid you wouldn’t be on time … you’d be caught there in the door of the classroom with all the other kids already sitting down and the teacher halfway through the roll, and the teacher would turn and look at you and say, Well, who have we here? and you’d slink back to the nearest seat, slide in, and say your name in a hoarse whisper above the general rustling of books and chairs and first-day-of-school bullshit around you.
It was the same every goddamn time, a miracle really, West Point could hit that little anxiety button somewhere along those fifty-five miles of road between New York City and the academy, hit the button again and again until by the time you reached the gate, your stomach was knotted, gripped with Total Fear … total fear of what? Fuck. All you were doing was going back to West Point, something you’d done dozens of times by firstie year, maybe hundreds … yet there it was, that little knot down there, tying your belly to your backbone, automatic stiffening of the posture, straightening of the neck, assumption of the Proper Cadet Attitude … and silence. Always total silence. You could be in a busload of cadets, and West Point could have just beaten Notre Dame in Shea Stadium, and still the bus would be seized with silence, rumbling and bucking its way up those fifty-five miles, every guy in the bus sinking a little lower and lower into that hole inside himself the closer they got, sinking and sinking, looking for some kind of goddamn protection, like if you went down there far enough you’d find some little guy inside you, come bouncing out saying, Hey, fuckstick, buck up, man! Only fuckin’ Woo Poo you going back to! Chin up, dullski! You been through this shit before! You be through it again soon enuf! Get yourself together, man! Any chick catch an eyeball on you like this, man, she gonna figure you for some kinda faggot or somethin’! Pull your shit outta that sling, mister! West Point ain’t doin’ this to you! You be! … You could dig around down there forever and still not find that little guy, and by the time the bus pulled up outside Grant Hall, its doors would disgorge the sorriest lot of stray-dog-looking fuckers, heads up, back stiff, but their faces! Jesus, the faces! You could see the skin hanging, hanging in folds under the eyes, from the corners of the mouth … hanging and drooping and sagging like curtains in a funeral parlor as they grabbed overnight bags and marched silently across Thayer Road, up Brewerton Road, up the ramp to New South Area, marching back to the barracks, back to The Life. Seemed like the longer you stayed there, the worse it got. And the older they looked. Firsties coming back from weekend looked like … like veterans … old grads … tottering along, easing themselves through the door of the Orderly Room to sign in, their signatures a pathetic scrawl of resignation, of the experience, repeated over and over and over again, that they were going back….
It was no wonder that most firsties returned to West Point from leaves drunk, having learned the army’s first law of personal thermodynamics, kill the fuckin’ pain….
What Slaight was thinking about, driving out of the garage on East Eighty-second Street, was a drink, a goddamn drink. That’s what he could use, a drink, right now, something cold and clear and full of ice and alcohol, gin preferably, indeed, a gin and tonic would do just fine, icing down his right hand and his head, icing down his belly for the drive back, the goddamn drive back up to West Point. Most of the time, he was drunk when he returned. Not stumbling drunk, but drunk just the same … numb … numb and quiet, in his mind already standing in supper formation, standing there on the area waiting, standing there waiting and clapping his hands … clap clap … clap clap … clapping his hands like the rest of the dull bastards around him…. Jesus. A drink. That’s all he needed, to walk into Hedges’ office smelling like the inside of the Officers’ Club bar …
They were driving Irit’s 1962 Mercedes-Benz 190-SL, a low white sports car with classic lines, red leather interior, the feel of a good horse between your legs. That’s what Slaight imagined the feel to be, anyway. He’d never ridden a horse in his life, but the elegant creak of the leather seats, the soft purr of the Mercedes exhaust note, must be like a horse, because he’d never known a feeling like it in his life. Back home in Leavenworth, in high school, Slaight owned a 1949 Ford, a classic automobile he had hot-rodded tastefully until the little bugger came on like a pedigree … lowered an inch all around, nosed-and-decked and painted a deep royal metal-flake blue, floor shifter, engine heads milled, ported, balanced, four-barrel carburetor, dual exhausts … the Ford was like a smooth pebble from a creek bottom, round and sleek and clean, slipping and sliding down Kansas blacktops like a little piece of midwestern weather, unpredictable, hot and fast. But the ‘49 felt like a car … it was Detroit, U.S.A., iron and rubber and plastic rolling stock, and you could always hear this sucking noise, this soft woooooooosh, as the four barrels of the carb ate Kansas air and spat fire out behind the rear bumper onto the pavement into the night….
That’s what it was. Cars in Kansas always meant night-time and driving around and rock and roll on the car radio, the raspy yowls of adolescence filling the passenger compartment, a loud, satisfying sound, rock and roll by bands like the Rolling Stones, dirty boys, nasty wired ear-splitting firewater music, hugely, purposefully offensive … the Ford engine would whine, mixing exhaust and music and wind, and somehow it all meant you’d never grow old, that all you could really do was live for right now….
Not so this 190-SL. Slaight and Irit were always driving in her elegant little sports car in the middle of the afternoon, whipping out to Montauk Point at the end of Long Island for oysters and lobster rolls and beer, taking in the sights. Forget rock and roll on the radio, not in the 190-SL … Slaight felt a bit nostalgic for that Ka
nsas hit of gasoline and noise, but he knew it was finished. By the time they hit the George Washington Bridge on the way to West Point to see Brigadier General Charles Sherrill Hedges, he knew he’d already grown fuckin’ old, the music had lied, like everything else.
And so if to prove it, here it came again, one more time, Bronx and Riverdale to the right, up the Hudson, Yonkers next … the river stretching away in either direction beneath a low haze of summer heat … steam rising from the water, obscuring the West Side Highway and the buildings of midtown, downriver … and upriver, up there around the bend, past the Tappan Zee Bridge and past Stony Point and past the Bear Mountain Bridge, another fifty miles now, hot wind in the face, turning onto the Palisades, Irit with a scarf around her black hair, squinting behind oversize shades, looking over the low, flat hood of the Mercedes, gazing up the parkway toward West Point, going back….
Slaight was guiding the Mercedes gently up the parkway, riding the edge of the speed limit, ever conscious that the State Police had a thing about catching cadets and their girl friends speeding on their way back to West Point, like they had nothing better to do, like cadets were the goddamn enemy or something. With the top down and the wind rushing past his ears, Slaight thought at first that his mind was sucking air like the carb on his Ford … woooooooosh … his memory slipping into that groove always there, just behind his eyeballs, the West Point groove. What the fuck? He was going back, first full day of leave or no first full day of leave. Irit, she understood. She was just sitting there being nice and understanding and providing the car, which was what girls were supposed to do … and Slaight, he was just slipping back in that goddamn groove and driving that Mercedes and letting the wind blow oxygen past him; he could use the fuel….
The man he was going to see, General Charles Sherrill Hedges, was a complete mystery to Slaight, though he had been commander of Beast Barracks exactly one year ago, when Slaight had been Hand’s squad leader. That month of Beast had seemed like a hot, stuffy trial, over which Hedges presided like a lawn-party host, in his tailored khakis and crisp summer dress whites. He was new to West Point, freshly returned from Vietnam, from the Big Red One, and guys had been shocked—laid out—when they saw this piss elegant … dude … that’s what he was, a fuckin’ dude in his custom uniforms and hand-embroidered ribbons and patent-leather shoes. By the time he was a cow, Slaight was used to seeing officers coming straight back from Vietnam looking like somebody had tied them behind an armored personnel carrier and dragged them through the whole goddamn Delta … they were haggard and worn out and beaten down and etched with the lines of a war that wasn’t so much being fought as it was being held together with baling wire and gaffer’s tape and spit and oil and nylon thread sent in CARE packages from home … these guys looked like they’d been there. Hedges … he looked like West Point, flashy perfection.
When he took command of Beast Barracks, he made it clear to the upperclass detail that everything was going to be as perfect as he was. Everything. To make his point, General Hedges ordered that all cadets would march with thumbs pointed stiffly toward the ground alongside the index finger, which would be curled, along with all other fingers, precisely and stiffly at the first knuckle. Not the second knuckle, or the third knuckle, and not a half-fist, or a fist … but this … this contraption, held in the karate-chop fashion, unwieldy, awkward, shifting the mind from marching, from the beat of the drum, to the curl of the fingers, the position of the thumb. It was nonsense, ridiculous bullshit, and every upperclassman knew it … two and three years they’d been cadets, and nobody had ever made them march like fuckin’ Nazis.
But there he was, General Hedges, the new com, attending formation after formation, skipping from company to company, checking the knuckle status of his young charges. With the eye of an eagle (later he would become known for his binoculars) Hedges would pluck from a formation a plebe (less occasionally an upperclassman) to give extra instruction in finger-curl and thumb-point, the proper procedure for shaping the Hedges marching hand. He often instructed a single cadet in front of the entire Beast Barracks formation, fifteen hundred strong, delaying meals and parades and training to do so. The routine went on for a month, General Hedges pacing the sidelines of one formation after another, his yellow cotton gloves clasped tightly in his left hand, striking his left thigh, time and again. In the few moments of quiet at each formation—reveille, breakfast, dinner, supper—when orders were not barked and commands were not echoing between the buildings, you could hear him even if you couldn’t see him.
Slap. Slap. Slap. Yellow gloves caressed his thigh.
Click. Click. Click. Oversize taps on the heels of his shoes hit the concrete, resonating through the area.
He was everywhere.
Slaight was puzzled by Hedges and had often watched him pace the formations. What was it about a goddamn brigadier general that made him come out and play diddly-shit with the cadets? Hedges had an unnervingly casual way with cadets of the upper classes in a one-on-one meeting, calling many by nicknames he seemed to pick from a bottomless pit of snappy, wisecracky handles. Slaight’s turn came. One night he was the recipient of extra instruction in finger-curl and thumb-point after an evening formation. It was late, sometime just before taps, and the Beast detail had just marched the plebes back to the barracks after a lecture in Thayer Hall. Slaight noticed from the general’s breath that he’d been drinking. Gambling for the moment that Hedges was just a bit more relaxed than usual, Slaight asked him about his obsession with pointed thumbs and curled fingers, since his own thumbs and fingers were being pointed and curled under the general’s close supervision.
“Mr. Sam,” said General Hedges, deliberately choosing the last three letters of Rysam Slaight’s name as his own personal manner of addressing him. “Mr. Sam, what I’m showing you here is just my way of putting my signature on my unit.”
Hedges bent over Slaight’s left hand, reaching down with his own to correct the posture of Slaight’s thumb, the precise curls of his fingers. Hedges’ hands felt clammy, cold in the hot summer night air. Slaight stood there waiting while a brigadier general finished leaning over and touching his hands—first his left, then his right—touching them, manipulating his thumbs and fingers until hey met his approval. Slaight was chilled by the notion that Hedges was getting off, touching his hands in the darkness. They stood alone on Brewerton Road behind the barracks, and upstairs, guys could be heard yelling at the plebes, Johns were flushing, showers started and stopped. In the distance, the mess hall clanked along, leaving supper, heading for breakfast. Noises surrounded them, but they were alone.
“Sir?” Slaight asked, breaking the tension, for Hedges was now standing there, just standing there staring at him.
“Sir, what do you mean, ‘put my signature on my unit’? I don’t understand.”
“You march like I tell you, Mr. Slaight,” said Hedges, shifting his body until his face was maybe ten inches from Slaight’s. “You march like I tell you, and you are mine.”
Thumb-point and finger-curl were not the only obsessions of General Hedges. He drilled the cadets in the miracle war being fought in Vietnam, far from the “fields of friendly strife” of West Point. At every juncture of training, Hedges pounded the drum for the “Combat Example” into the hot days and nights of Beast Barracks. Not a single thing happened between men, it seemed, to which the combat Example did not apply.
“How would you like to depend on that man in combat?” came the inevitable question from Hedges at lectures, out on the parade ground, on the training fields during bayonet drill and squad tactics.
“If that man failed the test here at West Point, think of what he might do in combat.” Hedges’ words hung over the heads of cadets like flags at half-mast, skeletal images of doom, a vision of all the world in terms of … war. But it was the way he used the word, combat, like a bludgeon to beat up on guys who were just messing up, being plebes, doing all the shitball stuff plebes are supposed to do on their way to beco
ming upperclassmen. He swung it like a club—combat—word coming around at you all the time, whistling through the air, landing with a dull thud on some poor fucker’s head every time Hedges took a notion. He didn’t criticize performance or point out ways to improve efficiency or encourage better attitudes. The word combat was interchangeable with the word career.
Hedges rarely spoke of combat in a strictly military fashion, following Clausewitz’s definition of war as the execution of political ends by other means … “other” meaning, of course, combat. Hedges preferred to speak of combat as desirable, necessary for a man’s career. The interdependence of men in combat became an interdependence of careers. Not only were lives at stake … so was rank, prestige, ratings by superiors, success. To Hedges, combat meant something else, something almost holy, the way he rattled the numbers around his war stories like change in a collection basket up in the Cadet Chapel. Combat meant body count, the measuring stick of victory in Vietnam. Hedges’ units in the Big Red One had greater body counts than any other units in Vietnam during the time he was there. He’d been promoted faster than any commander in the history of the war. And now Brigadier General Charles Sherrill Hedges was the commandant of cadets, a soldier’s soldier … a man’s man. The lesson to cadets was clear. The Pentagon had assigned him to the academy as an example for cadets to emulate. He was the kind of man they were supposed to become. He was army.
The next time Slaight saw Hedges up close was down at Benning, just two weeks ago. There they were on the First Class Trip, and they’d been road-marched in deuce-and-a-halfs out to some godforsaken little hilltop deep in the Georgia boonies of the Fort Benning military reservation, where they were supposed to witness another firepower demonstration, this one an example of the defense of a battalion-size night defensive perimeter. This was the real shit, the way they did it in Vietnam every night, they’d been told in lectures all day. Now it was growing dark, as they were ushered into dilapidated, collapsing sets of bleachers ringing the crest of the little hilltop. Some major from the Infantry School was out there on a PT platform with a mike and a blackboard showing a map of the hilltop, pointing out before it got completely black how the battalion was dug in all around the cadets. And sure enough, you could see them out there, 750 strong, their helmets poking up out of foxholes just this side of miles and miles of Concertina barbed wire, piled in a huge circle around the hilltop. Scattered around the enclosed circle were a half-dozen armored personnel carriers and several M-60 tanks, dug into defoilades, only their turrets and muzzles showing. Then it got dark and the cadets waited.
Dress Gray Page 16
