The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (7 page)

“Oh yew had a good job and yew left—”

“RIGHT!”

“Oh yew had a good gal and yew left—”

“RIGHT!”

And then he'd vary the tune a little: “Oh Jody rolled the bones when yew left—”

“RIGHT!” we'd yell in soldierly accord, and none of us had to wonder what the words meant. Jody was your faithless friend, the soft civilian to whom the dice-throw of chance had given everything you held dear; and the next verses, a series of taunting couplets, made it clear that he would always have the last laugh. You might march and shoot and learn to perfection your creed of disciplined force, but Jody was a force beyond control, and the fact had been faced by generations of proud, lonely men like this one, this splendid soldier who swung along beside our ranks in the sun and bawled the words from a twisted mouth: “Ain't no use in goin' home—Jody's got your gal and gone. Sound off—”

“HUT, WHO!”

“Sound off—”

“REEP, HOE!”

“Ever' time yew stand Retreat, Jody gets a piece of meat. Sound off—”

“HUT, WHO!”

“Sound off—”

“REEP, HOE!” It was almost a disappointment when he gave us route step on the outskirts of camp and we became individuals again, cocking back our helmets and slouching along out of step, with the fine unanimity of the chant left behind. When we returned from the range dusty and tired, our ears numb from the noise of fire, it was somehow bracing to swing into formal cadence again for the last leg of the journey, heads up, backs straight, and split the cooling air with our roars of response.

A good part of our evenings, after chow, would be spent cleaning our rifles with the painstaking care that Reece demanded. The barracks would fill with the sharp, good smells of bore cleaner and oil as we worked, and when the job had been done to Reece's satisfaction we would usually drift out to the front steps for a smoke while we waited our turns at the showers. One night a group of us fingered there more quietly than usual, finding, I think, that the customary small talk of injustice and complaint was inadequate, unsuited to the strange well-being we had all begun to feel these last few days. Finally Fogarty put the mood into words. He was a small, serious boy, the runt of the platoon and something of a butt of jokes, and I guess he had nothing much to lose by letting his guard down. “Ah, I dunno,” he said, leaning back against the doorjamb with a sigh, “I dunno about you guys, but I like this—going out to the range, marching and all. Makes you feel like you're really soldiering, you know what I mean?”

It was a dangerously naïve thing to say—“soldiering” was Reece's favorite word—and we looked at him uncertainly for a second. But then D'Allessandro glanced deadpan around the group, defying anyone to laugh, and we relaxed. The idea of soldiering had become respectable, and because the idea as well as the word was inseparable in our minds from Sergeant Reece, he became respectable too.

Soon the change had come over the whole platoon. We were working with Reece now, instead of against him, trying instead of pretending to try. We wanted to be soldiers. The intensity of our effort must sometimes have been ludicrous, and might have caused a lesser man to suspect we were kidding—I remember earnest little choruses of “Okay, Sergeant” whenever he dispatched an order—but Reece took it all straight-faced, with that air of unlimited self-assurance that is the first requisite of good leadership. And he was as fair as he was strict, which must surely be the second requisite. In appointing provisional squad leaders, for example, he coolly passed over several men who had all but licked his shoes for recognition, and picked those he knew could hold our respect—D'Allessandro was one, and the others were equally well chosen. The rest of his formula was classically simple: he led by being excellent, at everything from cleaning a rifle to rolling a pair of socks, and we followed by trying to emulate him.

But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can't last long—not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved. Reece rationed kindness the way he rationed water: we might cherish each drop out of all proportion to its worth, but we never got enough or anything like enough to slake our thirst. We were delighted when he suddenly began to get our names right at roll call and when we noticed that he was taking the edge of insult off most of his reprimands, for we knew these signs to be acknowledgments of our growth as soldiers, but somehow we felt a right to expect more.

We were delighted too at the discovery that our plump lieutenant was afraid of him; we could barely hide our pleasure at the condescending look that came over Reece's face whenever the lieutenant appeared, or at the tone of the young officer's voice—uneasy, almost apologetic—when he said, “All right, Sergeant.” It made us feel close to Reece in a proud soldierly alliance, and once or twice he granted us the keen compliment of a wink behind the lieutenant's back, but only once or twice. We might imitate his walk and his squinting stare, get the shirts of our suntans tailored skintight like his and even adopt some of his habits of speech, Southern accent and all, but we could never quite consider him a Good Joe. He just wasn't the type. Formal obedience, in working hours, was all he wanted, and we hardly knew him at all.

On the rare evenings when he stayed on the post he would sit either alone or in the unapproachable company of one or two other cadremen as taciturn as himself, drinking beer in the PX. Most nights and all weekends he disappeared into town. I'm sure none of us expected him to spend his free time with us—the thought would never have occurred to us, in fact—but the smallest glimpse into his personal life would have helped. If he had ever reminisced with us about his home, for instance, or related the conversations of his PX friends, or told us of a bar he liked in town, I think we would all have been touchingly grateful, but he never did. And what made it worse was that, unlike him, we had no real life outside the day's routine. The town was a small, dusty maze of clapboard and neon, crawling with soldiers, and to most of us it yielded only loneliness, however we may have swaggered down its avenues. There wasn't enough town to go around; whatever delights it held remained the secrets of those who had found them first, and if you were young, shy, and not precisely sure what you were looking for anyway, it was a dreary place. You could hang around the USO and perhaps get to dance with a girl long hardened against a callow advance; you could settle for the insipid pleasures of watermelon stands and penny arcades, or you could prowl aimlessly in groups through the dark back streets, where all you met as a rule were other groups of soldiers on the aimless prowl. “So whaddya wanna
do
?” we would ask each other impatiently, and the only answer was, “Ah, I dunno. Cruise around awhile, I guess.” Usually we'd drink enough beer to be drunk, or sick, on the bus back to camp, grateful for the promise of an orderly new day.

It was probably not surprising, then, that our emotional life became ingrown. Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip. Most of the gossip was self-contained; for news from the extraplatoon world we relied largely on the company clerk, a friendly, sedentary man who liked to dispense rumors over a carefully balanced cup of coffee as he strolled from table to table in the mess hall. “I got this from Personnel,” he would say in preface to some improbable hearsay about the distant brass (the colonel had syphilis; the stockade commander had weaseled out of a combat assignment; the training program had been cut short and we'd all be overseas in a month). But one Saturday noon he had something less remote; he had gotten it from his own company orderly room, and it sounded plausible. For weeks, he told us, the plump lieutenant had been trying to get Reece transferred; now it appeared to be in the works, and next week might well be Reece's last as a platoon sergeant. “His days are numbered,” the clerk said darkly.

“Whaddya mean, transferred?” D'Allessandro asked. “Transferred where?”

“Keep your voice down,” the clerk said, with an uneasy glance toward the noncoms' table, where Reece bent stolidly over his food. “I dunno. That part I dunno. Anyway, it's a lousy deal. You kids got the best damn platoon sergeant on the post, if you wanna know something. He's too
damn
good, in fact; that's his trouble. Too good for a half-assed second lieutenant to handle. In the Army it never pays to be that good.”

“You're right,” D'Allessandro said solemnly. “It never pays.”

“Yeah?” Schacht inquired, grinning. “Is that right, Squad Leader? Tell us about it, Squad Leader.” And the talk at our table degenerated into wisecracks. The clerk drifted away.

Reece must have heard the story about the same time we did; at any rate that weekend marked a sudden change in his behavior. He left for town with the tense look of a man methodically planning to get drunk, and on Monday morning he almost missed Reveille. He nearly always had a hangover on Monday mornings, but it had never before interfered with his day's work; he had always been there to get us up and out with his angry tongue. This time, though, there was an odd silence in the barracks as we dressed. “Hey, he isn't
here,”
somebody called from the door of Reece's room near the stairs. “Reece isn't
here.”
The squad leaders were admirably quick to take the initiative. They coaxed and prodded until we had all tumbled outside and into formation in the dark, very nearly as fast as we'd have done it under Reece's supervision. But the night's CQ, in making his rounds, had already discovered Reece's absence and run off to rouse the lieutenant.

The company officers rarely stood Reveille, particularly on Mondays, but now as we stood leaderless in the company street our lieutenant came jogging around the side of the barracks. By the lights of the building we could see that his shirt was half buttoned and his hair wild; he looked puffy with sleep and badly confused. Still running, he called, “All right, you men, uh—”

All the squad leaders drew their breath to call us to attention, but they got no further than a ragged “Tetch—” when Reece emerged out of the gloaming, stepped up in front of the lieutenant, and said, “P'toon! Tetch—
hut!”
There he was, a little winded from running, still wearing the wrinkled suntans of the night before, but plainly in charge. He called the roll by squads; then he kicked out one stiff leg in the ornate, Regular Army way of doing an about-face, neatly executed the turn and ended up facing the lieutenant in a perfect salute. “All presen'accounted for, sir,” he said.

The lieutenant was too startled to do anything but salute back, sloppily, and mumble “All right, Sergeant.” I guess he felt he couldn't even say, “See that this doesn't happen again,” since, after all, nothing very much had happened, except that he'd been gotten out of bed for Reveille. And I guess he spent the rest of the day wondering whether he should have reprimanded Reece for being out of uniform; he looked as if the question was already bothering him as he turned to go back to his quarters. Dismissed, our formation broke up in a thunderclap of laughter that he pretended not to hear.

But Sergeant Reece soon spoiled the joke. He didn't even thank the squad leaders for helping him out of a tight spot, and for the rest of the day he treated us to the kind of petty nagging we thought we had outgrown. On the drill field he braced little Fogarty and said, “When'd yew shave last?”

Like many of our faces, Fogarty's bore only a pale fuzz that hardly needed shaving at all. “About a week ago,” he said.

“'Bout a week ago,
Sah
jint,” Reece corrected.

“About a week ago, Sergeant,” Fogarty said.

Reece curled back his thin lips. “Yew look lak a mangy ole mungrel bitch,” he said. “Doan yew know you're s'posed to shave ever' day?”

“I wouldn't have nothing to
shave
every day.”

“Wouldn't have nothin' to shave,
Sah
jint.”

Fogarty swallowed, blinking. “Nothing to shave, Sergeant,” he said.

We all felt badly let down. “What the hell's he think we are,” Schacht demanded that noon, “a bunch of rookies?” And D'Allessandro grumbled in mutinous agreement.

A bad hangover might have excused Reece that day, but it could hardly have accounted for the next day and the day after that. He was bullying us without reason and without relief, and he was destroying everything he had built up so carefully in the many weeks before; the whole delicate structure of our respect for him crumbled and fell.

“It's final,” the company clerk said grimly at supper Wednesday night. “The orders are cut. Tomorrow's his last day.”

“So?” Schacht inquired. “Where's he going?”

“Keep your voice down,” the clerk said. “Gonna work with the instructors. Spend part of his time out on the bivouac area and part on the bayonet course.”

Schacht laughed, nudging D'Allessandro. “Hot damn,” he said, “he'll eat that up, won't he? Specially the bayonet part. Bastard'll get to show off every day. He'll like that.”

“Whaddya,
kidding
?” the clerk asked, offended. “Like it my ass. That guy loved his job. You think I'm kidding? He
loved
his job, and it's a lousy break. You kids don't know when you're well off.”

D'Allessandro took up the argument, narrowing his eyes. “Yeah?” he said. “You think so? You oughta see him out there every day this week. Every day.”