They discussed first the paper, then the future. Miss Benson expected him after the army to continue his literary studies at either Oxford or Cambridge. She thought it would be a good idea for Nathan to spend a summer bicycling around England to see the great cathedrals. That sounded all right to him. They did not embrace at the end of that perfect afternoon, but only because of Miss Benson’s age, position, and character. Zuckerman had been ready and willing, the urge in him to embrace and be embraced all but overpowering.
His eight unhappy weeks of basic infantry training were followed by eight equally unhappy weeks of military police training with a herd of city roughnecks and southern hillbillies under the equatorial sun at Fort Benning, Georgia. In Georgia he learned to direct traffic so that it flowed “through the hips” (as the handbook had it) and to break a man’s larynx, if he should wish to, with a swat of the billy club. Zuckerman was as alert and attentive at these army schools as he had been earning his summa cum laude degree from Bass. He did not like the environment, his comrades, or “the system,” but he did not wish to the in Asia either, and so applied himself to every detail of his training as if his life depended upon it-as it would. He did not pretend, as did some of the other college graduates in his training company, to be offended or amused by the bayonet drill. One thing to be contemptuous of soldierly skills while an undergraduate at Bass, another when you were a member of an army at war. “KILL!” he screamed, “KILL!” just as “aggressively” as he was instructed to, and drove the bayonet deep into the bowels of the sandbag; he would have spat upon the dying dummy too if he had been told that that was standard operating procedure. He knew when to be superior and when not to be -or was beginning at least to find out. “What are you?” Sergeant Vinnie Bono snarled at them from the instructor’s platform (a jockey before Korea, Sergeant Bono was reputed to have slain a whole North Korean platoon with nothing but an entrenching tool)-“What are you with your stiff steel pricks, you troopers-pussycats or lions?” “LIONS!” roared Zuckerman, because he did not wish to the in Asia, or anywhere for that matter, ever.
But he would, and, he feared, sooner rather than later. At those Georgia reveille formations, the captain, a difficult man to please, would be giving the troopers their first dressing down of the long day-“I guaran-fuckin-tee you gentlemen, not one swingin’ dick will be leavin’ this fiddle-fuckin’ area to so much as chew on a nanny goat’s tittie-“ and Zuckerman, ordinarily a cheery, a dynamic morning riser, would suddenly have a vision of himself falling beneath the weight of some drunken redneck in an alley back of a whorehouse in Seoul. He would expertly crack the offending soldier in the larynx, in the groin, on the patella, in all the places where he had crippled the dummy in the drill, but the man face-down in the mud would be Zuckerman, crushed beneath the drunken lawbreaker’s brute strength-and then from nowhere, his end would come, by way of the knife or the razor blade. Schools and dummies were one thing-the world and the flesh something else: How would Zuckerman find the wherewithal to crack his club against a real human patella, when he had never been able to do so much as punch somebody’s face with his fist in a schoolyard fight? And yet he had his father’s short fuse, didn’t he? And the seething self-righteousness to go with it. Nor was he wholly without physical courage. After all, as a boy he had never been much more than skin and bones beneath his shoulder pads and helmet, and yet in the sandlot football games he played in weekly every fall, he had not flinched or cried aloud when the stampede had come sweeping around his end of the line; he was fast, he was shifty-“wiry” was the word with which he preferred to describe himself at that time, “Wiry Nate Zuckerman”-and he was “smart,” and could fake and twist and fight his way through a pack of thirteen-year-old boys built like hippos, for all that he was a boy built like a giraffe. He had in fact been pretty fearless on the football field, so long as everybody flayed, according to the rules and within the spirit of the game. But when (to his surprise) that era of good fellowship came to an end, Wiry Nate Zuckerman retired. To be smashed to the ground because he was the left end streaking for the goal line with the ball had always been all right with him; indeed he rather liked the precarious drama of plucking a spiral from the air one moment, and then in the next, tasting dirt, as the pounds piled up above him. However, on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1947, when one of the Irish kids on the Mount Holly Hurricanes came flying onto the pileup (at the bottom of which lay Zuckerman, with the ball) screaming, “Cream that Yid!” he knew that his football career was over. Henceforth football was no longer to be a game played by the rules, but a battle in which each of the combatants would try to get away with as much as he could, for whatever “reasons” he had. And Zuckerman could get away with nothing-he could not even hit back when attacked. He could use what strength he had to try to restrain somebody else from going at him, he would struggle like hell to prevent damage or disfigurement to himself, but when it came to bringing his own knuckles or knees into violent contact with another, he just could not make it happen. Had never been up to it on the neighborhood playground, would be paralyzed for sure on the mainland of Asia. An attentive and highly motivated student, he had earned the esteem of a trained killer for the manner in which he disemboweled the sandbag in basic training- “That’s it, Slim,” Sergeant Bono would megaphone down to his favorite college graduate, “that’s grabbin’ that gook by his gizzard, that’s cuttin’ off the Commie bastard’s cock!”-but face to face with a real live enemy, he might just as well be carrying a parasol and wearing a bustle for all the good his training as a warrior was going to do himself or the Free World.
So, it looked as though he would not be taking that pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral after all, nor would he get to see the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, or the churches where John Donne had preached, or the Lake District, or Bath, the setting of Persuasion (Miss Benson’s favorite novel), or the Abbey Theatre, or the River Liffey, nor would he live to be a professor of literature some day, with a D. Litt. from Oxford or Cambridge and a house of his own cozy with fireplaces and walled with books; he would never see Miss Benson again, or her garden, or those fortunate 4FS, Fischbach and Osterwald -and worse, no one, ever again, would see him.
It was enough to make him cry; so he did, invariably after being heroically lighthearted on the telephone with his worried mother and father in New Jersey. Yes, outside the phone booth, within hearing distance of the PX jukebox-“Oh, the red we want is the red we got in th’ old red, white, and blue”-he would find himself at the age of twenty-one as tearful and panic-stricken as he had been at four when he had finally had to learn to sleep with all the lights off in his room. And no less desperate for his mommy’s arms and the feel of his daddy’s unshaven cheek.
Telephoning Sharon, being brave with her, would also reduce him to tears afterward. He could hold up all right during the conversations, while she cried, but when it came time to give up the phone to the soldier standing next in the line, when he left the phone booth where he had been so good at cheering her up and started back through the dark across that alien post-“Yes, the red we want is the red we got in th’ old red, white, and blue” -he had all he could do not to scream out against the horrible injustice of his impending doom. No more Sharon. No more Sharon! NO MORE SHARON! What proportions the loss of Sharon Shatzky assumed in young Zuckerman’s mind. And who was she? Who was Sharon Shatzky that the thought of leaving her forever would cause him to clap a hand over his mouth to prevent himself from howling at the moon?