by Pat Conroy
“What on earth are you talking about?” Tradd said furiously. “Would someone in this room please tell me the exact hour when all my roommates had complete psychotic breaks with reality? And what is all this talk about a house and a general? Or is it ten houses or ten generals?”
“Let’s keep Tradd out of it,” Mark repeated.
“If it can hurt you guys, then I have a right to know,” Tradd said. “If it’s harmful to you it should be equally harmful to me. It’s condescending to protect me. It’s as though I’m less of man than any of you.”
“They’ll tell you after I leave, Tradd,” I said. “You’re right, we should have told you, but there’s no time now.”
“Get away from the door, Mark,” Pig warned. “Will can go to the house if he wants to go to the house. He can’t help it that he loves niggers. I didn’t like oysters when I first came south. But I acquired a taste for the little boogers and that’s the same thing that happened to Will with niggers.”
Mark stared at Pig incredulously. “What a fucking idjit,” he said, shaking his large head sadly from side to side. “Let Will love them all he wants after graduation. He’s sleeping here tonight.”
“Mark,” I said. “I promised Pearce that I’d help him if those guys ever took him. Remember what they did to Bentley? Remember how they tied him up and threw him into the trunk of a car? Can you imagine how scared Pearce must be with ten white boys taking him out into the country? I just want to go to the house to find out who’s in The Ten. If we can just get one or two names, we’ve got them. We can neutralize them and make sure that Pearce survives the year. I want to find out who they are, Mark. I want to find out for me, not for Pearce. I need to know their names. Then they won’t be able to hurt anybody. I’m curious, Mark. I want to know why they exist and why they operate out of the framework of the Corps.”
Tradd spoke up from behind me. “Mark’s right, Will. You’re overwrought and sticking your nose in a place it shouldn’t be. I don’t even know what you’re talking about, but it’s obvious you shouldn’t break barracks and go gallivanting about. Why don’t you just take a Sominex and get some valuable shut-eye? If something’s bothering you this much, just forget that it exists and eventually it’ll disappear.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, Tradd. That Pearce will simply disappear,” I said, then turning to Mark I said gently, “I’ll need your help getting out of the barracks, Mark.”
“Fuck you,” Mark said. “You aren’t even getting out of this door.”
“Mark,” I said. “Just this once. That’s all I’ll ever ask of you. Just this one time and I’ll never ask you for another favor. I’ll need your help to get out of the barracks. A diversion.”
“Did you find a note in The Decline of the West?” Tradd asked. “Did Pearce try to warn you in any way before tonight?”
“We changed the system of communication,” I said.
“What?” Mark said. “You didn’t tell us that, Will. I thought we had no secrets in this room.”
“That’s obviously a falsehood,” Tradd said, miffed.
“Someone was intercepting the notes, Mark,” I explained. “Pearce thought it might be the Bear.”
“And you thought it might be one of us,” Tradd said.
“I just didn’t think it was important, Tradd,” I explained. “There were no more basketball trips and no reason for any of you to check for messages anymore.”
“That’s a breach of trust, paisan,” Pig said, shaking his head sadly, “you didn’t trust us.”
“This room is a veritable hotbox of secrets,” Tradd said. “I still don’t know the big secret you’re hiding from me.”
“We stepped in some powerful shit when we went up to Columbia a while back, Tradd,” Mark said.
“Tell me,” Tradd begged. “I have a right to know and I’m nearly perishing from curiosity.”
“Tell him after I get out of the barracks,” I said, listening as I heard the far-off whistle of the northbound train as it mounted the trestle on the far side of the Ashley River.
“My God, it’s already eleven forty-two,” I said, checking my watch.
“Right on time. Like always,” Pig said.
“You and Tradd take care of the diversion,” Mark said, leading me by the elbow out into the galley. “I’ll get Robin Hood out of the barracks.”
Escape from the barracks after taps required caution and artistry. Over the years, cadets, like other kinds of prisoners, spent much of their time devising routes and rituals of escape if the need arose to make their way to the real world during the hours between taps and reveille. On the first division of each barracks, small trap doors pocked the floors of the rooms; these doors led to a honeycomb of passages among the water pipes and electrical wires beneath the barracks. But since the Bear had returned as Commandant of Cadets, he had eliminated these avenues of escape by sealing up the existing trapdoors and severely punishing cadets who constructed new ones. Cadets in the Airborne Ranger Program had been known to rappel down the side of the barracks like rock climbers in a matter of seconds. Rope ladders, grappling hooks, and hacksaws to remove bars from the gates of rarely used sally ports had served in emergencies since the early days of the Institute. I had never left the barracks illegally, but I knew that Pig and Mark would insure my successful escape and re-entry. They had mastered the intricate stratagems for leaving the barracks at will and had often left in darkness to drink all night in the waterfront bars. As I followed Mark along the shadows of the first division, I reflected upon my irresistible attraction to the strong and the lawless. I did things because of Mark and Pig that I never would have done alone. Tradd and I were naturally timorous good citizens. Yet I wanted to acquire the militant courage of Mark and Pig more than anything, to taste the black and fearless life, to rush at things, to seize each moment and live it as though it were my last. If I could not live like that, at least I wanted them to think I could.
We slipped into the room of two O Company freshmen, a room next to the guardroom. One freshman snored loudly, like an engine in need of tuning, and his snoring emphasized the immense stony silence of fourth battalion. As we waited for Pig to make his move, I became aware of my wrist pulse against Mark’s shoulder. I could feel my heart beat and the fiery, enlivening flow of adrenalin in the blood. Aware of my blood, of the heat in my body, of the unstillable activity in my cells, I braced as we saw a match flare high on fourth division where we lived. I was living again in the inspirited zone of pure instinct. I was an athlete again, a gamesman.
The first cherry bomb arced across the barracks in a flaming parabola.
“He’s using his slingshot,” Mark whispered.
It exploded on the second division of N Company, directly opposite from Pig. Since the barracks were completely enclosed, the explosion reverberated with the power and terrifying plangency of an artillery shell.
The OG rushed out of the guardroom, strapping on his sword and awkwardly positioning his field cap. Any disturbance in the barracks was his responsibility, and his eyes scanned the galleries for movement. The second cherry bomb landed on T Company’s third division. Cadets began stirring in the barracks and moving sleepily out on the galleries to inspect the disturbance. The guard ordered everyone back into their rooms on the double. But the barracks were alive now, and the cadets, anonymous and sleep-dazed, began taunting and cursing the guard. In the confusion, Mark and I entered the guardroom on the run. Mark grabbed the set of heavy steel keys, slipped out the side door of the sally port, opened the gates soundlessly, quickly, and whispered, “Good luck and be careful,” as I made my way in darkness toward the barbed-wire fence behind the faculty housing. I was sprinting when I heard the third cherry bomb explode. Pig had shot that one directly at the OG, who dove to the concrete to avoid losing an eye.
Soon I was entering my car, which I had parked off campus in the parking lot behind the football field. I drove quickly through the city toward the eastern side of the Charleston p
eninsula. When I mounted the Cooper River Bridge, crossing over the first of its high massive arcs, I could see the city shimmering and spired behind me and smell the virile harbor beneath me. I rolled down my window and felt the cold luxuriant air rush past me in great stinging gallons. I tried to relax; I tried to pretend I was not afraid. I imagined I was Pig or Mark. They would not be afraid.
But my hands trembled on the steering wheel, and I could feel the fear begin its business with me. I could feel it nervously moving within me like a thin silky gauze. There were stirrings all over my body and in different forms. Fear was a citizen of the stomach, a thin man at the knees. I should have asked Mark to come with me, I thought. All I had to do was ask and he would have come. So would Pig. So would Tradd. “What in the hell have I done to myself now?” I shouted aloud as I reached the highway 17 by-pass around Mount Pleasant.
Once I had thought the plebe system would make me fearless. By submitting myself to the canons of a merciless discipline, I had imagined that I would never again be physically afraid in the world. But the plebe system had had an opposite effect: It taught me that the world was indeed a place to fear. I had always wanted to be brave and strove desperately to hide the indisputable fact that I was a coward. Because I was ashamed of my cowardice, I had mastered the subtle art of appearing brave. What had been essential to my vanity in the barracks was not that I actually came to the aid of Pearce but that I demonstrated the sincere appearance of wanting to help him. The appearance would have been enough for me. I was certain of that. But they had trusted the sincerity of my wishes, and once again I had become a victim of my own fraudulent, pathetic bravado. Once I had ensnared myself in its ingenious trap, there was no way I could turn back. I could not turn back and face the contempt and derision of my roommates. But more significantly, I could not turn back because I knew I was afraid. By continuing to drive north toward the old rice and indigo plantations of the Wando River, I was paying ultimate homage to that fear and my inability to surrender to its tyranny over me. The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it. I comforted myself by saying that my only duty on this night was to gather information. I promised myself that I would not be seen by a single living soul.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Extinguishing the lights of the car, I crossed the wooden bridge that spanned the tidal creek leading to General Durrell’s plantation. Driving slowly down the dirt road that led to the main house, I came to a locked gate. I hid my car behind a palmetto grove beside a small family cemetery and started down the road on foot. There is always a lurid sense of menace to Southern forests at night, especially when the oak trees are centenarians and their branches, braceleted with thick vines and draped with their scarves of moss, bend low to the earth to make the darkness darker. There have always been too many live things in these forests for me. I would probably not have feared them—or The Ten—if I could identify them or their calls and shrieks. I was glad it was unseasonably cold as I walked, for I never liked walking the backwoods of the Carolinas during the high season of the Eastern diamondback. Soon, I was running and running swiftly; the flashy guard was running and afraid.
Suddenly, in full flight, I rounded a curve in the road and the plantation house came into view. It was fully lighted but there was not a car or human being in sight. Pausing, I drifted along the edge of the woods and began planning my approach to the house. I began speaking to myself in a low, unnerved whisper. The sound of my own voice reassured me, called me, as though my voice was the only absolute proof I had of the reality of the moment. “Easy, Will. Careful, Will. Find out who they are, then get the fuck out of this place.”
Keeping to the forest, I circumnavigated the house, which gleamed like a white ship in the center of a perfectly trimmed lawn. In some outbuildings behind the house, I found three automobiles. All of them had Institute parking stickers, and I wrote the numbers of the stickers and the makes of the cars on a piece of paper in my wallet. I also recognized one of the cars, and I wrote down the name of the first of The Ten in my class: John Alexander.
But I still did not know for certain if Pearce was in the house. Unless I saw him with my own eyes there would be no value to my witness or testimony. Searching for the safest approach to the house, I crossed a road behind it that led to the ocean a quarter of a mile away. I had once had a footrace with Johnny DuBruhl down that road at a cookout the General gave for the basketball team in my junior year. I could just hear the breakers rippling along the beach.
A colonnade of oak trees led from the rear of the plantation house to the formal gardens enclosed by a lichen-covered brick wall. Crawling along the wall, I made it to the first tree, surveyed the house, then ran to the next tree. By keeping in the protection of those trees, I arrived unchallenged at the thick hedge of azaleas that encircled the entire house. The azaleas were perfect cover for my reconnaissance; they were trimmed precisely to my height and I could crouch unseen, moving from window to window, at my own slow pace.
The living room in the front of the house was empty and still, but there were uniforms scattered on coffee tables and chairs and slung insouciantly across a baby grand piano. There was no light on in the dining room, but there was a door open and I could see a light on in the hallway. I moved through the azaleas cautiously, silently; and for a moment a delicious, almost palpable curiosity had replaced the fear.
Then I heard the strangest voices I had ever heard in my life: human voices I was sure, but they sounded more like the witless chorales of insects in the forest than anything readily attributable to the family of man. I had to cross into the light of the front portico and dash past the entry steps to get to the western wing of the house where I heard the voices. My ears registered each sound in the night. I looked around me and studied the terrain again before I continued my secret approach. I felt as if I could hear the flight of owls or the death of leaves in the garden. So alive was I, so burning with the intoxicants of this exact moment, that I felt as if I could count each cell of my body with my index finger. My body seemed enlarged, tingling, electric, and somehow invulnerable as I crept unseen beneath the covering azaleas. From the human shadows moving grotesquely on the lawn in front of me, I knew that whatever the activity taking place in the house it was occurring in the multiwindowed room on the far western wing. I was ten feet from the room when I heard the first scream.
Yes, Tom Pearce and I had indeed come to the same place on the same chilly April night.
Cautiously, I peered into the bottom pane of the first window in that room. The scene was exactly as Bobby Bentley had described it except for one significant and disturbing difference. When the members of The Ten screamed at Pearce they did so in high-pitched, effeminate voices, which collectively had the sound of a choir of possessed and maniacal castrati.
Pearce was tied up in a wooden chair in the middle of a room with no other piece of furniture in it. They had stripped him naked and sweat poured in dark streams from his brown, well-muscled body. A look of supreme agony and inexhaustible suffering shone in his eyes. His mouth had dropped open and saliva hung from his lips in obscene strings. Anger began to take the place of fear as I watched.
They worked on him in squads of three, screaming at him in those other-worldly, disembodied voices. On the brick floor I could see the sweaty imprint of Pearce’s body and imagined their beginning the evening by breaking Pearce physically with three or four hundred pushups.
“You gonna leave my school, nigger?” one of the masks asked.
“No, sir,” Pearce answered, though his voice was barely audible.
“We’re gonna kill us a nigger tonight, Pearce. I always wanted to kill me a nigger,” a voice said from a part of the room I could not see. There was so much movement in the room I could not count them accurately without being seen. But I was sure I knew how many of them were in the room.
“It’s gonna be like this every night for the rest of the year, nigger. When you gonna sleep, nigger?”
“How does it feel to be a nigger, boy?” another mask screamed. “To wake up knowing you’re a black cocksucker every day of your life. You’re an ugly nigger boy. But you’re going to be a dead nigger soon. We might even kill you tonight if you’re lucky.”
“I’m gonna make you suck my cock, nigger. That’s the only thing niggers are good for. To suck a white man’s cock. To suck their master’s dick. You want to suck my sweet white cock, nigger?”
“No, sir. Please, sir,” Pearce cried out.
“Give him the juice again,” one voice shouted as Pearce began screaming and struggling against the ropes that were cutting into his flesh. There was blood on his wrists.
The black masks surrounded him, all screaming, some of them laughing, but the insane, demented, and joyless laughter one would expect to hear in inaccessible wards of insane asylums. The masks and voices were hideous in the lovely light of a chandelier, incongruously placed in this bizarre room obviously not built for chandeliers. The room must have been an old kitchen, I thought, but the wing looked new and I wondered to myself if the room had been constructed especially for these grim rites. Four of them held Pearce as a fifth applied a small clamp to the head of Pearce’s penis. Then he flicked a switch and an electric current flowed brutally into Pearce’s body, and he convulsed as he screamed. The screams carried over the entire island.
We had learned about counterinsurgency techniques in military science classes in our four years at the Institute. Experts in the field informed us that electricity, properly applied, could break a man’s resistance quicker than any other method of interrogation.
The guy controlling the switch was John Alexander. I don’t know how I knew for certain, but his stiff carriage and the odd way he balanced his shoulders when he moved revealed his identity as certainly as a fingerprint. An asshole moves like an asshole even when he wears a mask.
