Over the first month it was all physical fitness. Reveille at dawn. Formation, inspection, waving practice. Then down to the beach for warm-up exercises. “Move it!” they’d yell. “Agility! Hostility! Make it hurt!” And it did hurt. Even Sarah felt it, even Rafferty. It was the kind of hurt that comes to visit and rearranges the spiritual furniture.
Unreal, I’d think, but I couldn’t ignore the pain.
There were jumping jacks, I remember. We ran and climbed ropes and took nature hikes at full speed. We learned to say “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” and little else. No use complaining, because the penalty was pain. There were push-ups and sit-ups and hot afternoons on the obstacle course. There was tear gas, too—I remember the sting. I remember Tina crying. All night, it seemed, she cried, and in the morning there was more pain.
“Maniacs,” I told Sarah. “Psychosis. Deep in the crazies.”
In the second week I came up hard against the barrier of self-pity. Here, I thought, was everything I’d run from. But you couldn’t run far enough or fast enough. You couldn’t dodge the global dragnet. The killing zone kept expanding. Reaction or revolution, no matter, it was a hazard to health either way.
Day to day, I did what I could. Arms and legs, just the bodily demands. The days seemed to skid by, and even now, looking back, I remember very little in the way of detail.
The fierce sun.
Mushiness in the extremities.
Ollie huffing, Tina straining under the forces of fat and gravity, Sarah’s lip swelling up in reaction to the tropical heat.
I remember intense thirst. Intense hunger, too. Yearnings for Coca-Cola and the air-conditioned wonders of a Holiday Inn. America, I’d think, but this was somewhere else. We were tutored in hand-to-hand combat. We ran mock relay races up and down the white beaches. Often, at night, we were awakened and made to stand at attention against the courtyard wall.
“A good waver,” Ebenezer Keezer told us, “is a rare cat in this day an’ age. Everywhere I go, I see half-ass waves that don’ truly emanate from the inner soul. A sorry commentary. Collapse of the social fabric, that’s what it is.”
“God’s word,” said Nethro. “Ebenezer and me, we just missionaries out to spread the wavin’ gospel.”
“Tell it.”
“I did. I tol’ it.”
A sunny afternoon, and Tina Roebuck sat in the sand and folded her arms.
She did not move.
Squatting down beside her, Ebenezer Keezer frowned and said, “Oh, my. Tuckered Tina. El mucho fatigo?”
She did not move and she did not speak.
Ebenezer lifted her shirt, very gently.
“I’m famished,” he murmured.
But even then she was silent. Arms folded, she gazed straight ahead, northward, where the sea curved toward the Straits of Florida.
Ebenezer pinched her stomach.
“Let me eat it,” he said softly. “Be a good girl now, let me eat that yummy tummy.”
But she did not move.
A drugged, dreamy expression. Her eyes were empty. It was the emptiness that follows upon surrender, and one by one it happened to all of us.
In mid-December, as we moved into our second full month, the curriculum turned increasingly technical. We learned the craft of crime: how to break and enter and spot surveillance and plant a bug and sweep a room and untap a telephone. The platitudes of felony, spoken straight, had the sound of wisdom. “Always travel first-class,” Nethro said, “ ’cause the law goes coach.” There were many such maxims, lessons passed on from Jesse James. The best disguise is a crowd. The best weapon is brain-power. “In God we trust,” said Nethro, “but don’ forget to frisk him.”
There was also a formal side to our training. Most evenings, after dinner, we would assemble in the lecture hall for a series of so-called political education seminars. Indoctrination, I suppose, but there was no haranguing; if anything, Ebenezer’s presentations had a low-key, almost professorial quality. In one instance he outlined and analyzed the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. He reviewed constitutional doctrine and explicated key passages from the Federalist papers and the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. He reminded us that our republic had been born in disobedience, even terrorism, and that the faces which decorate our currency had once appeared on English Wanted posters.
“The line between sainthood and infamy,” Ebenezer said quietly, “is the line between winning and losing. Winners become statues in public parks. Losers become dead.”
There was a pause.
“Dead,” he said.
Then another pause, longer, after which he smiled.
“Dead, children. Losers get embalmed. Our purpose here is to produce winners.”
Over the course of those evening seminars, it became clear that both Nethro and Ebenezer were true professionals. They never preached or proselytized; there was no evidence of ideology. Combat veterans, of course—nothing theoretical. They were mechanics. Turners of nuts and bolts.
“A guerrilla-type war,” Ebenezer told us. “Which means we take a page from our good brethren Uncle Charlie. No trenches, no battle lines.”
“Tell it,” said Nethro.
“Ghost soldiers. Invisible. Like in the Nam, we hit here, hit there, then beat sweet feet.”
“Oooo!” Nethro said.
“During the day we wear our civvies. We melt away, we nowhere to be found. And then at night—”
“Ooooo!”
“At night we do our business. Slick little operations. In an’ out, like surgery, then presto, we vanish, we gone. Nothin’ but boogiemen. Ghost soldiers.”
It was important stuff, I suppose, but I had a hard time digesting the implications.
Ghosts, I’d think.
Tombstones and cemeteries, all the consequences of ghost-hood.
I wanted out.
A motivation problem, I told Sarah. Not enough mobility or hostility. A shortage of spirit. Turned around, I said. I’d walked in blind, I hadn’t understood the terms.
Sarah stepped out of the shower.
She toweled off, dusted herself with powder, examined her breasts in a mirror, and stood on the bathroom scale. One hundred and twelve pounds, but each ounce carried authority.
“Well,” she said, “you’re crawling up on a conclusion.”
“Hard to say.”
“Say it.”
I wiped off a damp spot at the small of her back.
“Everything,” I said. “Start with treason. And this boot camp thing—those two zombies. Like a death squad. Can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, they’re all gunslingers. Completely scrambled. But it’s lethal. I know that much, it’ll kill somebody.”
“Lethal?” Sarah said. She stood facing the mirror. Her skin was a glossy brown, freckled at the shoulder blades. I wanted to touch her but it seemed inappropriate. After a moment she turned. “Funny coincidence, William, but that’s exactly what the folks in Da Nang keep saying. When the artillery comes down. Kaboom. Lethal, they say.”
“Granted.”
“Lethal times. Take it or leave it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Leave it.”
“Walk?”
“Maybe.”
For a moment she looked at me without expression. Then she smiled. It was a neutral smile, not angry, just dense with indifference.
“Sissy-ass,” she said. “A sad case, man.” She aimed a hair dryer at me. “Anyhow, you wouldn’t last ten minutes out there on your own. What about cash? Connections? And this minor legal hassle with Uncle Sam—you guys had a date, remember?”