by Pat Conroy
“How?” Mark asked.
“I pissed in his face.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Give me a chance to kill myself if I ever cuss in front of your mother.”
“That’s an even greater crime than cussing in front of Theresa,” Pig explained. “That’s probably the greatest crime a man can commit.”
“We’re almost there,” Mark said, peering out the window. “There. That’s the dirt road. Turn, baby. It’s almost show time.”
We drove for over three miles on the dirt road. The railroad tracks ran out through the southern edge of the swamp and the road we were on went up to the tracks but did not cross them. Pig stopped the car and for a brief moment we listened to the innumerable sounds of the Congaree and the muffled thump of Dan Molligen beating rhythmically against the top of the car’s trunk like a damaged heart.
“He could have a fife and bugle corps with him out here and no one would ever hear,” Pig said. “When do you think we’ll get a train, Mark?”
“We’ve got all night and you know they make the run from Charleston to Columbia pretty often,” Mark answered, looking at his watch. “Let’s get Bimbo tied to the track. We don’t want to miss a train.”
“Here,” Pig said, reaching into a brown shopping bag in the back seat. “Ol’ Mark thought of everything. Put one of these on, Will.”
They were Halloween masks, grotesque and out of season, that fitted over the entire head. They smelled like decomposing inner tubes. We exited the car as three, monstrously warted ghouls, a matched and awful trinity. As Pig opened the trunk I breathed in the rancid smell of cheap rubber. The smell and the liquor sickened me.
Lifting Molligen roughly, we carried him struggling and moaning to the old rusted tracks that ran parallel and three yards away from the new ones. The tracks still in use had the silvery health of steel polished by the weight and awesome friction of trains at full throttle hurtling through the Carolina darkness. Mark cut him out of the mattress cover with a butcher knife commandeered from Molligen’s house. He was blindfolded, gagged, and trussed securely in what appeared to me to be a professional manner. Working with speed and efficiency, Pig and Mark laid Molligen across the tracks and tied him at the throat and thighs. Then Mark removed the gag and the blindfold to begin the interrogation.
The three of us crouched around him as his eyes adjusted to seeing again. We could measure the precise speed of the adjustment from the time the blindfold came off to the time we heard him gasp with a kind of desperate fear when he focused on our masks.
“Who are you?” he said. “What do you want from me?”
Then he quickly changed his tactics and said in a more controlled voice, “I’m a professional lawyer. There could be some serious consequences to your actions.”
Pig giggled, enjoying himself immensely.
“You’re going to be dead within an hour, Mr. Molligen,” Mark said in a high-pitched voice that sounded like a blend between an adolescent girl and the death-screams of the rabbit I had killed on that long-ago Thanksgiving Day. He was disguising his voice so that Molligen would never recognize him in the same way that Bentley had recognized Molligen. Pig and I followed Mark’s example instinctively and with a certain pride in the thoroughness of our roommate’s canniness under pressure. We took on the unnatural voices.
Pig wailed, “You gonna be cut in half by a train, Toecheese motherfucker.”
“You guys are crazy,” Molligen answered in his deep lyrical drawl, still making a superhuman effort to control his panic. It was easy to understand why Bentley never forgot the timbre and quality of that voice. There was a contemptuousness and sonorous menace that must have made him particularly feared among the plebes.
“You’ve hurt a friend of ours,” I said in the changeling voice.
“Who did I hurt?” he screamed, tensing against the ropes, lifting his neck toward us, veins extended in his throat and forehead. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Answer our questions, Molligen, and we’ll let you go,” Mark said. “Fuck with us and we’re going to feed you to the first train that comes along.”
“I’ll answer any question you want to know,” Molligen said, his eyes peering into the darkness down the track toward Charleston. “Hurry up and ask it. Hurry up.”
“Are you a member of an organization called The Ten?” Mark asked.
“No,” Molligen answered. “I’ve never heard of that organization.”
“If you don’t want to tell us the truth, Molligen, then we’re just going to leave you on the tracks.”
But Molligen had seen something. He had seen Mark’s ring.
“You’re from the Institute,” he shouted. “You’re from the Institute. I wear the ring, you bastards. I wear the ring and you’re doing this to one of your brothers.”
“Good-bye, brother,” Mark said, rising to leave. “Say hi to the big train when it cuts you into three big pieces.”
Pig and I left with Mark, walking without haste, and we were almost at the car when Molligen screamed for us to come back.
“Yes, I’m in The Ten,” he admitted when we returned. “Now please untie me. I’ve told you what you wanted to know.”
“You only told us one thing we wanted to know, Toecheese,” Pig said.
“Where’s the house, Molligen?” I asked, leaning down in his face, the misshapen nose of the mask touching his face. “Where is the house you bastards take knobs when you’re trying to get rid of them?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, you fucking prick,” he said. “You must be crazy.”
At that very moment I saw the dead, weary eyes of Poteete looking out over the quadrangle of the fourth battalion on the last night he spent on this earth. The crazy eyes of Poteete after they had taken and broken him at the house.
I backhanded Molligen’s face as he lay with his head half-sunk in gravel. Then I slapped it again coming back the other way. I saw blood on his mouth and I felt Mark lifting me up by the shoulders.
“I’m a nice guy, Molligen,” I said, breathing hard and stunned with the suddenness and violence of my attack. “A nice guy who just wants a simple answer to a simple question.”
“Yeh. You’re a peach,” he said, glowering at me.
“Listen,” Pig shouted cheerfully.
“The train,” Mark said matter-of-factly “We better get out of here. We don’t want to be anywhere around here when they find him.”
Molligen’s face came apart with a seizure of fear awesome in its completeness.
Leaning down, Mark replaced the blindfold over Molligen’s eyes. His body strained against the ropes and a sickening, pitiful whine filled the air.
“It wouldn’t be humane to let you watch it, Molligen. We really are nice guys,” Mark explained. “We’re thinking about you all the time.”
The train was thundering through the Congaree swamp wide open. There were no crossings to slow for on this stretch of the run to Columbia, no worry about drunk farmers in their pickups, no concern for anything except the power of the diesel and the swift delivery of freight. The light of the train was small at first and miles away in the flat lowlands. But it grew swiftly, like something ravenous and all-seeing and demonic. It came bearing down on us, a raging, maniacal eye, out of the wilderness, out of the swamplands, above the black rivers; it came with fury and incalculable, terrifying immensity to the man who felt its approach in his spine.
The glinting rails nine feet from Molligen’s head strained and braced for the passing of the train. His screams were despairing and unhinged.
“The house, Molligen?” Mark asked.
“The house is . . .” Molligen started.
“Yes?” said Mark, tapping the butcher knife against the rail by Molligen’s ear. “The train’s coming fast, Molligen. There’s not much time.”
“It’s General Durrell’s plantation house. The one on Pritchard Island. Now cut me loose. Please. Please cut me loose. Goddam it.”
“Sorry,
Molligen,” Mark said. “You waited too long. There’s just not enough time.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Molligen screamed above Pig’s laughter. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
The train roared past us, mythic and flying and huge. Gravel shot past us like cartridges and even Molligen’s screams were drowned out by the passing train.
When the train had gone, Mark walked up to Molligen, who had fallen into a stunned silence. Mark removed the blindfold and stared down into Molligen’s face.
“You bastards. You rotten fucking bastards. You bastards. You rotten fucking bastards.”
“We made a mistake, Molligen,” Mark said. “We thought the train was coming on this track. Now you better pretend all of this is a big joke. If you don’t then we’re going to blow The Ten sky high and you’re going to be the stool pigeon. Then we’re going to come back and get you, Molligen, and tie you on the right track.”
Molligen lifted his head and said, “I’ll see you again, you motherfuckers.”
Mark cut the ropes that fastened him to the rails. Then he cut the ropes that bound his feet and legs. Walking twenty feet down the track, Mark stuck the butcher knife into a railroad tie.
“Cut yourself loose when you can walk again, Molligen. Follow the tracks to the next highway. Take a left, and in three miles you’ll be at the Interstate. Forget this ever happened.”
“Adios, Toecheese,” Pig said, and all of us sprinted to the car as Molligen tried to regain the use of his legs. In less than twenty minutes we were out of the Congaree swamp and heading back to Charleston.
We had reached I-26 when I realized we were still wearing the masks. None of us had spoken since we had left Molligen; all of us were lost in our own private, turbulent thoughts about that evening and what it implied about the future. When we removed the masks we became ourselves again. Cruelty was an easy sport to master when practiced anonymously. I was shaking again, not from revulsion at what I had done, but from something more sinister. I was shaking because I had enjoyed it all so much, every bit of it. I had especially enjoyed slapping Molligen and making him bleed. It was as though I was striking out against everything that had ever hurt or frightened me. Finally all my invisible terrors had a face. I had struck that face and seen blood form on its lips. For three years I had resisted all temptations to engage in the services and rituals of the plebe system. I had not screamed at plebes or starved them at mess or humiliated them on shower-room floors, but I had learned those macabre arts secretly and well. While Pig drove us toward Charleston, I realized that I had, at last, fulfilled my destiny and had taken my place as a cadreman, as a breaker of men. Was I doing all this for Poteete and Pearce and Bentley, or was I doing this because of a runaway megalomania I could not control? The answer lay in the very question, and I stared at the mask as though I had unearthed an effigy of my own endangered soul.
Pig was the first to break the silence.
“The General. The goddam General,” he said. “Wait’ll we tell the Bear.”
Mark disagreed. “We don’t tell the Bear anything. We’re not going to breathe a word to anyone about what happened tonight. Goddam, Will,” he said, looking at me contemptuously. “You’re heavyweight champ of the world against guys who are tied up. I bet you’re hell on newborn babies and terminal cancer patients.”
“Go suck on your chloroform rag, Mark,” I snapped back. “I got carried away. That’s all. I didn’t like the look on his snotty face. He was so goddam superior.”
“Well, boys,” Mark said, ignoring me. “We’ve got a serious reason to keep our mouths shut now.”
“Why, Mark?” Pig asked.
“Because if it’s the General behind all this and he finds out it was us who took Molligen, then we won’t graduate from the Institute in a million years.”
“What if they make a move against Pearce?” I asked.
Mark looked at me and said, “Will, I say let’s give them the nigger. Let’s give them anybody they want. I don’t give a shit if The Ten runs out every goddam knob in the Corps as long as I get my diploma. I say we don’t say a single word to anyone, not even Tradd. If he doesn’t know anything, then he can’t be hurt by it. And I’ll guarantee you, they’ll be looking for the three of us.”
“Yeh, fuck Pearce anyway,” Pig agreed. “I don’t like niggers any more than The Ten does. Let’s let it drop, Will. OK, paisan?”
“What about Poteete and Bentley?” I asked. “Do we just forget we know all about that now? Do we just let The Ten keep terrorizing guys like that?”
“That’s what the plebe system’s all about,” Mark said. “Terror. Pure human terror on a grand scale. It’s like what we did to Molligen tonight. We terrorized him. Or at least, Pig and I terrorized him, Will. You beat him.”
“Maybe I should go talk to the General,” I said. “Man to man. Tell him what we found out. Maybe he doesn’t even know they use his house.”
“Yeh, Will,” Mark sneered. “Explain to him how we happened to be walking down the railroad tracks wearing Halloween masks and stumbled upon the body of Dan Molligen.”
“I vote we keep our asses out of it, paisan,” Pig said. “Man, we had a great night. A fabulous, kick-ass night that we’ll tell our children about. But we got to let them have the nigger. Agreed?”
“I agree,” said Mark.
But I said nothing. There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.
Chapter Thirty-seven
They took Pearce from his room in second battalion on the first Monday in April, on a rainy overcast night with fog lifting off the rivers and the prediction of a cold front moving in from the Midwest. Tradd and I were studying together for a test in medieval drama, straining irritably to extract meaning from those lean, extinct words that had fallen unmourned from the language. Mark was studying a chemistry text, making tiny notations in the margin and smoking one cigarette after another. Pig claimed he had nothing to study and was lifting weights in his corner of the room.
A sophomore orderly of the guard knocked and entered the room.
“Will McLean?” he asked, and brought a message to my desk. “It’s from second battalion, Will. A knob just ran it over and said it was urgent. A few guys were racking his ass for being in the wrong battalion. That’s why it took so long to get to you.”
As he left the room, taps sounded high over the campus. I opened the note and read these words: Two cadets took my roommate Tom Pearce from our room tonight. They said his grandmother was very sick and that he was authorized to go on special leave. He told me to contact you, Mr. McLean, if he was ever taken out of the barracks for any reason.
“Pig, Mark,” I said, sitting down in my chair, trying to think clearly, trying to formulate some kind of strategy. After our interrogation of Molligen, I had thought that he would issue a warning that someone was on the trail of The Ten and the organization would lie low. I had thought our secret foray against them had rendered The Ten impotent because we were as invisible and undetected as they were. “They took Pearce from the barracks. This is a note from his roommate. Two guys came and said his grandmother was sick.”
“Maybe his grandmother is sick,” Mark said, unconcerned.
“Then the Bear would have come to tell him,” I answered. “You know how it works around here.”
“You think it’s The Ten?” Pig asked.
“What are y’all squawking about now?” Tradd asked. “I think everyone in the room has lost his mind except me and I’m losing mine because I continue to live in this insane asylum.”
“It’s something you don’t need to know about or want to know about, Tradd,” Mark said. “Don’t ask any more questions. It’s just Will thinking he lives in Sherwood Forest.”
“I’m going to the house,” I said, rising. “You know that’s where they’ve taken him.”
“You aren’t going anywhere, Will,” Mark said, moving over to block the door. “You aren’t going to fuck
this room up any more than you already have for a nigger. There’s some bad shit going on that we don’t need to stir up.”
“Has everybody in this room taken complete leave of his senses?” Tradd said, looking at each one of us, sensing our complicity and his exclusion. “I have a right to know what’s going on.”
“If Tradd doesn’t know anything, then he can’t get hurt by what we already know,” Mark insisted. “We owe it to him to keep him out of it.”
“We’ve never had secrets in this room, paisan. I don’t see any reason to keep secrets from Tradd. I haven’t liked it from the beginning,” Pig argued. “He’s a paisan like the rest of us and paisans tell each other their deepest thoughts.”
“He didn’t fuck up like the rest of us,” Mark said. “He didn’t hear what Molligen told us on the tracks. The General’s in this, Will. Don’t you see, if the nigger really is at that house, then they’re doing this with the General’s permission?”
“The General?” Tradd said.
“Mark,” I said, moving toward him slowly. “I’m going to that house. I’ve got to do it.”
“Why, Will?” Mark shouted. “Tell me the real reason why you’ve got to go. Is it because of your overwhelming love of niggers or is it something else, something we don’t know about? There’s not a single goddam reason you should stick your neck out for Pearce. If it was just your ass I wouldn’t care, but you could bring us all down with you. Even Tradd.”
I tried to answer Mark firmly, but my voice quavered as I said, “Pearce doesn’t have anyone to help him, Mark. He’s going through the line all alone.”
“Well, aren’t you the sweetest guy in the world?” Mark said. “Aren’t you a prince among men? Look, Will, there are a hundred billion niggers living outside the Gates of Legrand. Let them help him. They’re the ones who sent him here. He’s no concern of this room. We’ve got studying to do just to graduate. We’ve got senior essays to write. And you don’t even know for certain that they’ve taken him to the General’s house or that it’s The Ten that’s got him.”
