The Heavenly Table(37)
20
BACK AT CAMP PRITCHARD, Lieutenant Bovard was standing weak-kneed and hungover outside a barracks, watching Sergeant Malone demonstrate some exercises to a group of fresh recruits. Last night, he had bypassed the usual cocktails and small talk at the officers’ club in Meade and accepted the sergeant’s halfhearted invitation to have a drink at the Blind Owl, a tavern a few blocks farther down Paint Street across from the foul-smelling paper mill. Imagining the place would be jumping with all manner of sordid characters, from knife-wielding ex-convicts to pasty-faced gamblers to alcoholic adulterers to perhaps even a fallen woman whose sleazy talents included picking up coins off the floor with her nether parts, Bovard found himself instead in a dreary, piss-smelling room lit by a couple of sooty, rusted lanterns watching Malone stare silently into the fly-specked mirror behind the bar while the only other customers, a decrepit banjo player and his young harp-playing sidekick, sat in the corner nursing mugs of flat, musty-tasting beer and debating where they were going to make their bed come closing time. A bit disappointed, the lieutenant was just getting ready to call it a night when the sergeant, sometime around his fifth whiskey, suddenly began talking about his experiences with the Red Cross on the Western Front. Malone spoke in a low, somber voice for the next two hours, his eyes never straying from his reflection in the glass, as if he were a priest watching a stranger spill his guts in a sanctuary. At midnight, the bartender, a burly, wooden-faced oaf who hadn’t emitted a single sound the entire evening, turned out the lamps; and the sergeant, in mid-sentence, shut up and never said another word, not even during the taxi ride back to the base.
After slipping past the guards at the gate, Bovard had stumbled to his quarters so aroused from what Malone had said that he was still awake at reveille, his handkerchief stiff with ejaculate and his hand cramped so badly that he had a difficult time lacing up his boots. Two cups of strong coffee had revived him somewhat, and now, watching the new soldiers break out in a sweat, he felt himself growing hard again. One boy in particular had caught his eye, a slim, olive-skinned youth named Wesley Franks. Thankfully, his erection quickly subsided when he heard Malone call out, “At ease!” Wiping some sweat from his brow, he glanced at the men as they collapsed to the ground, gasping and moaning. He watched a tubby boy named Meecham roll over on his hands and knees and puke in the dirt. Jesus, he thought, a few leg raises and jumping jacks and they’re crying like schoolgirls. No, this wouldn’t do. A single second-rate gladiator working weekends on the coliseum circuit for a few extra denarii could have wiped out the entire f*cking platoon with a butter knife.
He then looked over at Malone, and suddenly became aware of the wheezing in his lungs, the rivulets of whiskey residue streaming from his pores. Built like a blacksmith, with a thick, black mustache and a long jagged scar running along his jawline, the sergeant was certainly an imposing figure, but, shit, he was also nearly twice as old as any of them. Perhaps because of a strange sort of camaraderie he now felt with the man after listening to his confessions in the Blind Owl, or maybe because he was ashamed that he had spent the night jacking himself into a frenzy over what he’d heard, it suddenly didn’t feel right to just stand around, as he had been doing the last couple of weeks, and allow Malone to handle everything. Bovard thought for a minute. Though he’d never seen a man gutted with a bayonet or slept standing up in a pit swimming with rats, he did still hold the record at the Hill School for the mile, had been captain of the rowing team at Kenyon. Tossing his cap to the ground, he told Malone to go sit in the shade. He ordered the men to line up and tighten their boot laces. My God, they could barely stand. What they needed, he thought, was something inspirational, a short speech aimed to get them focused. “A soldier of the Roman Empire,” he began, “could jog all day long at a steady pace with a full pack that weighed somewhere between thirty-five and forty pounds.” Pleased with his opening, he paused for a moment to let that bit of information sink in. He was about to continue when someone in the back mumbled, “What the hell’s he talkin’ about? Fuck, we ain’t Romans. You a Roman, Davy?”
Bovard’s face quickly flushed crimson with anger and embarrassment. Oh, you’ve got that right, you dumb hillbilly, he thought to himself. Not a one of you sorry bastards would make a good pimple on a legionnaire’s ass. He was on the verge of blurting out such an insult when he glanced at Malone, still standing at his side, a passive look on his face, ready to take over again whenever his superior had had enough of playing leader for the day. He steadied himself. “No, we’re not,” he said instead, “but we are Americans.” Then he turned and pointed at a tall oak that stood half a mile away at the eastern edge of the base. “Three times to the tree and back, gentlemen. Follow me.”
After he’d run them into the ground—a quarter of the men lay practically helpless in various spots along the route—Bovard casually walked over to where a shaky Wesley Franks was sprawled out in the grass attempting to uncap his canteen. “Here,” he said, crouching down on his haunches, “let me help you with that.”
“Thank you, sir,” the boy managed to say between gulps of air.
Bovard twisted the top off and handed the canteen back; and Wesley sat up and proceeded to drain it. Resisting the urge to tell him to slow down, the lieutenant waited until he was finished, then asked, “Where are you from, Private?”