At noon Ebenezer Keezer clapped his hands and said, “Recreation time, people. Fun an’ games.”
Single file, we marched through the courtyard and down a long grassy slope to the tennis courts. There were no rackets or balls. The game was called Fictitious Tennis, and the rules, I thought, were capricious. “Advantage, Shithead!” Ebenezer cried—“Quiet, please!”—and then we pantomimed the mechanics of serve and volley, rushing the net, backpedaling in pursuit of high phantom lobs. “Out!” Nethro would yell. Or he’d yell, “Let! Two serves!” There were no disputed calls. For me, at least, it was hard to maintain a keen competitive edge.
The match went five sets. An awards ceremony, a quick lunch, then we convened on the volleyball court.
“No net,” said Ebenezer.
“No problem,” said Nethro.
In the late afternoon they led us on a nature hike. The pace was brisk, mostly running, and by dusk, when we trooped into the villa’s courtyard, things had approached the point of shutdown.
We ate supper standing up.
Afterward we were escorted into a small lecture hall. The room was bare except for a podium and five metal chairs.
Ebenezer Keezer smiled at us.
“This concludes,” he said, “our first day at camp. I trust we’re all relaxed.”
His beret was gone. He wore a dark blue suit, a blue tie, a crisply starched white shirt with gold cuff links. His voice, too, had changed. There were no dropped consonants, no ghetto slurrings; it was the precise, polished voice of a corporate executive. Smoothly, referring now and then to notes, he outlined the program that lay ahead. He stressed its rigors. The idea, he said, was to stop a war, which would require certain skills, and certain qualities of a physical nature, among them stamina and strength and the capacity to resist hardship. “Resistance,” he declared, “entails resistance.” Then he discussed the particulars of Vietnam. It was a firsthand account, largely anecdotal. He talked about the effects of white phosphorus on human flesh. He talked about anatomy. He described the consequences of a foot coming into contact with the firing mechanism of a Bouncing Betty, the reds and whites, the greenish-gray color of a man’s testicles in bright sunlight. He smiled at this, and winked. He leaned forward against the podium, adjusting his tie, and spoke quietly about a morning in 1966 when his platoon of marines had gone on a buffalo hunt in Quang Ngai province, how they’d entered the village at dawn, and burned it, and how, afterward, with the village burning, they had moved out into a broad paddy where the buffalo were—big slow water buffalo, he said, maybe a dozen, maybe twenty—and how the platoon had lined up in a single rank, as if on a firing range, and how without hunger or provocation the platoon had gone buffalo hunting—like the Wild West, he said, like Buffalo fucking Bill—how they put their weapons on automatic, M-6os and M-16s, how it was slaughter without aim, just firing to fire, pistols, too, and M-79s, and grenades, and how those slow stupid water buffalo stood there and took it broadside, didn’t run, didn’t panic, just took it, how chunks of fat and meat seemed to explode off their hides—how the horns exploded, and the tails and heads—but those ignorant damned buffalo, he said, they took it, they didn’t make sound, and how there was the smell of a burning village and munitions and those buffalo that wouldn’t run or die, just took it. Ebenezer paused and shuffled his papers. “That’s the Nam,” he said softly, “and it’s unbecoming. I’ve seen my share of buffalo. And you folks—you nice folks have not seen shit. Understand me? You have not seen shit.” There was conviction in the room. There was also, I thought, anger. Ebenezer Keezer folded his hands and smiled and went on to discuss evil. He was specific about atrocity and saturation bombing. The war, he told us, was a buffalo hunt, and we would be wise to disabuse ourselves of romantic notions regarding the propriety of peaceful protest and petitions of grievance. We were soldiers, he said. Volunteers one and all. It was an army. “Like in wartime,” he said, and his smile was cool and pleasant. “When there’s evil, you learn to absorb it. You build up your resistance. This here’s buffalo country.”
He studied his notes, then nodded at Tina.
“Young lady,” he said, “front and center.”
Tina moved to the podium.
Deftly, with the tip of his thumb, Ebenezer lifted her yellow T-shirt. “Yummy,” he whispered. Tina’s stomach was conspicuous under the white fluorescent lighting. Fish-colored, it seemed, bloated and pale and slightly bluish. She wore a white bra. Her breasts, too, were large, but Ebenezer ignored them.
He chuckled and dipped a finger into the belly fat.
“Now, then,” he said, “let us discuss obesity. You porkers gross me out.”
He grasped Tina’s stomach with both hands.
“Piggies!” he said.
Tina squirmed but he held tight.
“Fatsos! Grease!”
Still smiling, Ebenezer bent down and put his mouth to her stomach and licked the flesh.
“Pigs!” he yelled. “Pigs and pork chops—I want to eat it! Gobble it up, all those good juices. Can I eat your fat, girl?”
Tina whimpered.
“Say the word, I’ll definitely eat it. Yes, I will. I’ll swallow it.”
“No,” said Tina.
“One bite?”
“No.”
She tried to back away, but Ebenezer Keezer had her by the fat. Oddly, I found myself thinking about Mars bars, the relations between fantasy and gluttony. Eyes half shut, Ebenezer was nibbling at her belly.
“Oink!” he said. “Go oink, babe. Give me a piggy squeal.”
“Oink,” Tina said.
“Louder!”
“Oink!” she cried.
“Oooo, good! Oink it up!”
Tina oinked and wept.
Later, when it was over, Ebenezer’s tone became philosophical. He dwelled on the need for physical fitness. Soldiers, he told us, are neither pigs nor pork chops. Resistance required resilience.
“For the next sixty days,” he said, “you lardballs are my personal property. I say oink, you definitely oink. I say don’t oink, you definitely abstain from oinking. Same applies with Nethro. We own you. Questions?”
There were no questions.
“Wunderbar,” he said. “Sleep tight, kiddies. Tomorrow’s a weird day.”
That night, as in many nights, I indulged in fantasy. It was a means of escape, a way of gliding from here-and-now to there-and-then, an instrument by which I could measure the disjunction between what was and what might be. I imagined myself in repose beneath a plywood Ping-Pong table. I imagined my father’s arms around me. I imagined, also, a world in which men would not do to men the things men so often do to men. It was a world without armies, without cannibalism or treachery or greed, a world safe and undivided. Fantasy, nothing else. But I pressed up against Sarah, stealing warmth, imagining I was aboard a spaceship sailing through the thin, sterile atmosphere of Mars, and below were the red dunes, the unmoving molecular tides, and I smiled and stroked Sarah’s hip and whispered, “Bobbi.” There was guilt, of course, but I couldn’t stop myself. Stupid, I thought, all fluff and air, but then I remembered Martian Travel, and the grass, and the great calm as we flew high over the darkened seaboard of North America. I remembered that Leonardo smile—eyes here, lips there, the blond hair and soft voice. I imagined embarking on a long pursuit. Pick up the airborne scent and track her down and carry her away. A desert island, maybe, or the planet Mars, where there would be quiet and civility and poetry recitals late at night. Peace, that’s all, just a fantasy.