The Savage Innocent 2015

I suppose it's a flaw of mine but I went about straightening my things because I was, all-in-all, taking this whole military thing quite seriously. I shined my shoes, polished the brass insignia that would adorn my uniform, laid out my things just-so, just as proscribed in the Cadet's Manual of Conduct. I think I heard Rand laugh under his breath when he came back from his shower. He put his things away and dressed for dinner just as Crist arrived on the floor.

I was surprised, in a way, by what happened next -- but maybe I shouldn't have been. Rand stood at attention, eyes dead ahead, shoulders square, fingers just so -- as Crist strode into our room. He looked over my stuff and complimented me, then walked briskly from the room; I could just make out the faintest traces of a smile on Rand's face when we walked downstairs to form-up on the quad outside the dorm. We were, you see, from that day forward marched in formation to the Dining Hall, where we confronted legions of pimply-faced Napoleon-wannabes who were intent on making our first year on campus a living Hell. I'd have to say that, with much shouting and consternation, they managed to do just that.

There were retired military personnel at every cadet table, and our table was headed by a very stern-faced Marine, a Sergeant Major who, we were told, taught Military Science to first year cadets. We heard this man had fought in Europe and Korea, and had gone to Vietnam but was seriously wounded and came home after just a few months. I looked at the guy, Tom Shipman was his name by the way, and had no doubt in my mind he could lead a battalion to retake Hue right after dinner. His belly was flat, his arms looked like sunburned-flesh over taut steel cable, and his eyes remained in a perpetual squint, like he was taking aim down the barrel of an M-16. He was a United States Marine through and through, and that night was the first time I think Rand had ever been impressed by another human being. I think the feeling was mutual, too.

Later that night, while we sat at our desks and melted Kiwi to do our shoes, the two of us talked a little about what we'd been through those past few weeks. In his usual circumspect way, Rand seemed to digest every emotion and question before opening his mouth, but several things became clear as we talked. He missed his father, hated his mother, and really, really hated being "incarcerated in this hell-hole." We hadn't talked too much before, at least not about this kind of stuff, so I was a little surprised by what came next.

"So, just why are you here?" I asked. "I assume you mean you didn't want to come?"

He looked at me like I was some kind of pathogenic fungus under a microscope: "Hell no, I didn't. Don't tell me you did?" he asked incredulously.

"Yeah, I did."

"No shit?" He continued his examination, now wide-eyed in disbelief.

"I cannot tell a lie, Rand. No shit."

"Fuck."

"Aptly put. Why are you here?"

"I didn't have a choice."

"Really?" It was my turn to act the smart-ass -- so I jumped in head first. "What do you mean?"

"Really. My dad works for the State Department; we've lived in Europe most of my life." He looked away for a moment, parsing words and emotions, looking for just the right combination, I suspect.

"That sounds kind of neat," I volleyed back into his court and ran to catch his next shot.

"My mom and dad fight all the time. I mean all the time. Until last year, anyway."

I didn't know what to say. "Oh?" I think I finally said. His eyes were burning a hole in the desk. "What happened last year?"

"My brother was killed. Vietnam."

"Oh. Sorry."

"He was a pilot. In the Navy."

"Yeah?" I looked at him hard now; his eyes were red and fixed on the shoe polish sitting on the desk in front of him. Jaw rigid, muscles under the skin on the side of his face walked with him through the rigid dimensions of his anger -- a tiger pacing it's cage.

"Yeah. Shot down," he said, his teeth clenched. "SAM."

"Sam?" I said, his meaning lost.

"Surface to air missile. S-A-M, Sam."

"Oh."

"Yeah. 'Oh.' Sometimes I imagine that's exactly what he said, you know, when he realized what was happening."

"What happened to your father?"

"He stopped drinking."

"Oh."

"I think he stopped breathing, too, at least for a few months. Then he and mom really started in on each other. I didn't see him much after that, and he sent me packing to D.C., then enrolled me in this place a few weeks ago."

"What about your mom?" I said as a shiver rolled through me.

"Jack Daniels," he said those two words so quietly I almost couldn't feel the hurt, and yet I understood. We had that much in common already, I reckon.

+++++

I seem to remember going to class occasionally, but what stands out most now was football practice, and those first few games when poor Tucker Harriman got pounded into the ground. I almost felt sorry for the kid; he floundered around the field like someone who had stopped believing in himself, but I swear, sometimes it looked like he had forgotten how to breathe. The games we played in early September were in-league, meaning the opposing teams were from other mid-Western military schools like our own, so not as daunting as that local high school, but pretty solid competition even so.

It didn't make a hell of a lot of difference. Harriman just couldn't handle the load, but even after two terrible games, the coach just didn't have the stones to bench him.

Then something characteristically weird happened, but then again, everything about that year was weird. Weird could've been Rand's middle name.

So, it all started with Rand and Harriman talking during practice, but it was plain to see Rand was coaching him, helping the kid find himself again. They stayed late after practice and threw the ball and talked, then Rand convinced me and a couple of the other receivers to hang around and we ran patterns while the sun set every afternoon. The coaches watched, I guess, and covered for us; anyway, we turned up late for dinner more than once and no one blistered our tails. Pretty soon Harriman was completing passes again, even sounded a little more sure of himself. When we were loading up for our next game, he seemed alright with his place in our little world.

It was an away game, down in Lexington, Missouri, and on the bus ride down Coach announced that Rand would be starting at quarterback. Harriman slid down in his seat and Rand's jaw clenched. We suited up and took to the field; Coach called a fullback blast after the kick-off and Rand audibled a right slant out and threw an easy interception; the cornerback pranced into the end zone and spiked the ball.

Next possession - same routine, only this time I knew Rand was deliberately tossing the ball high for an easy pick-off. Coach fumed and called Harriman over, told him to get ready to go in on the next possession and you could see the kid inflate like a Firestone. He was probably the only guy out there, God bless him, who didn't know what the fuck was going on. Rand huddled with Harriman by the bench and I could hear him working on Harriman, stoking the fires, building him up, and sure enough the kid went in and tossed a right fair post pattern to rocket named Perry and we had seven points on the board. Harriman was alright after that, and had a great year.

I didn't know what to think about Rand after that. Hell, no one did. Kind of funny, though, when you think about it, because all those soldiers were there to teach us leadership, but the biggest lesson we learned that year came from a fifteen year kid who had grown up in Switzerland.

+++++

The school had a decent reputation for being a total bear academically, and after the first few weeks no one doubted that in the least. Even Rand was impressed.

His parents were what you might call intellectuals. They met at Georgetown and both had continued on to Boston; Colin Rand to the Fletcher School and Ruth Carlson to Harvard Law. The Rand kids had, as I've mentioned, grown up in Europe, Zurich for the most part, and Dalton was fluent in Latin, German and French by the time he was nine. Italian came easy after that, so did Spanish. His mother was a reluctant, if very learned teacher with a ton and a half of time on her hands, so suffice to say academics came easily to Rand. Too, I think today most people would say people like the Rands come from the deep end of the gene pool, and they would be right on-the-mark. It's just a simple fact of life that sometimes gets lost in all the noise out there, but some people are just smarter than others.

While I didn't consider myself a slouch academically, after mid-terms I found myself hovering just above the jaws of academic probation. When my grandfather received notice of that interesting bit of news, I was promptly informed there would be no problem re-enrolling at the local high school come January. The problem for me was, well, my less than stellar aptitude for algebra. Rand was in Calculus and I was in Algebra I; Rand was taking Honors Physics (doing celestial mechanics, for Christ's sake) and I was struggling to get through Physical Science. He soon handed me a new nick-name: Moron. It hurt. If anyone else had called me a moron I would have flattened them; coming from Rand it was an evisceration. And I felt like I had let him down.

And to this day I still don't know why.

+++++

Parent's Weekend rolled around in late October, and my mother came at the anointed time -- no surprise there. What did surprise me was that my sister Madeleine came with her. And here I need to digress a little, for our story now takes a sudden, sharp turn to the left.

I was kid number two, and probably an afterthought at that. Madeleine was the apple of everyone's eye, doted on by one and all, the chosen one. I say this not out of jealousy; indeed, I took it all in stride because I pretty much felt the same way about her. I loved her, just like everyone loved her; Hell, she was lovable. And everyone it seems, especially my father, loved her unconditionally. Unbeknownst to me, my father had a little something more than an infatuation going on with Madeleine, and while she was more a friend to me than a sister, she was leading a double life that had been tearing her apart for years. I didn't know it then, but Dad's infatuation was tearing our family apart.

Madeleine? She was protective and nurturing, all a little brother could ask for. Another salient feature? She was known far and wide as the embodiment of feminine perfection, and by junior high, her first year as a cheerleader, she was the most popular girl on campus, and the boys came calling. For a while I think she probably believed some of the cheerleader hype, but the reality she lived with was far more sinister. Double lives, double binds, splitting right down the middle, Madeleine's reality finally fused with father's infatuation one rainy night in the backseat of his Lincoln. She had just started her junior year, and the details get pretty sketchy at that point. Rumors ran high and wide, while life at home went to Hell.

Though I had no clue, the summer I shipped off to Indiana marked the second year of her stay at a mental hospital in the hills overlooking Palo Alto, California. I was told she had "gone away to a special school" or some such nonsense the year before, and buckets of like drivel greeted her absence that summer. My mother was by then deep into her love affair with Jack Daniels, she had been for quite some time, so it was a bit of a surprise when Mom showed up without Dad, and that she wasn't drunk. Anyway, Madeleine's presence was the stunner, as I hadn't seen her in a year.

Sorry, one last digression now. As I've mentioned, Madeleine had just about every girl I ever knew beat hands down in the looks department. She had Grace Kelly eyes and wavy strawberry blond hair that people stopped to stare at, and she couldn't do a damn thing about it. She was just gorgeous, movie star gorgeous. Why or how someone with so much going for her ended up so shy and unsure of herself was a mystery to me.

I used to ask myself that question all the time when I was a kid. I think about that now and start to bleed inside all over again.

Anyway. My mother was no slouch in the looks department herself; that end of the gene pool was pretty deep on her side of the family. She'd been on her way to a starring role in a minor Paramount production when she ran into my dad; he'd charmed her right out of the life she'd dreamed of and still had no idea what had happened. Dad was reputedly a damn fine lawyer, so one has to assume he knew how to lie pretty well.

So anyway, along came Mom and Madeleine, and there I was on the parade ground in my dress blues -- probably looking like something out of a Mickey Rooney movie. As predictably self-conscious as I was, every pair of eyes in the Cadet Corp was riveted on Madeleine. She was, as she always was, radiant, blindingly so, and I heard Rand mutter under his breath something about the blond on the second row.

"That's my sister, Dickhead," I said to him, cheerfully.

"Can't be," he whispered, undaunted. "Nothing as ugly as you could be related to that."

I smiled, for truth be told I was proud Madeleine was my sister, and seeing her now after so long only made that pride run deep. Rand's affirmation just made the joy more immediate.

And besides, I was happy. Happy enough to not notice my father wasn't in the stands.

+++++

Parent's Weekend is also Homecoming Weekend, so of course we had a big football game on the schedule for Saturday. And naturally, as the game was against a bitter rival there were lots of alumni around. It was late October by that weekend, and the air was already crisp and clear when we took to the field Saturday at noon, the scene framed by turning leaves at their furious best. Butterflies the size of barn owls fluttered in my gut, yet behind all the game day jitters were thoughts about dinner the night before.

Those of us whose parents had come for the weekend were given leave from our normal duties, and so we could venture off-campus for dinner Friday night. I was allowed one guest, so of course Rand came along -- as there was no way his parents were coming. There is a nice inn not far from school, and Mom had secured reservations for the weekend well in advance; their dining room was reputed to be first rate, if a little on the pricey side; even so she had reserved a table both nights. Mom appeared sober when Rand and I arrived, and if her sobriety held the night promised to be, if not interesting, then certainly one to remember.

Mom came down in a luxurious cloud of Chanel No 5, and while it seemed Jack Daniels had taken leave for the evening, my skin still crawled. We walked into dining room and Madeleine said it was all kind of cute, "kind of English country cottage meets West Point," and we laughed at that. With the twenty or so tables all occupied with cadets and their parents, the atmosphere was more than a little strained, but all very, very polite. The menu, it turned out, was in French -- which launched the evening down the most hysterically pretentious roads possible. Madeleine was in rare form when Rand read the menu to our table, she was entranced, impressed, attentive, her eyes batting semaphores of lust. Yet I don't think I was the only one to notice that something in her eyes seemed a little off balance, maybe a little clouded over.

And Rand may have taken his eyes off Madeleine when I introduced him to my mother, but frankly, I doubt it. No, when I introduced Madeleine he bowed, took her hand and kissed it. Madeleine blushed, a first for her in my experience, and he rushed around to get her chair and seat her. The dining room was overflowing with unctuous chatter, and Rand noticed a retired four-star general sitting two tables away, which put a damper on our table's chit-chat. I guess I would be remiss if I didn't say that both Rand and I were all too aware we were being watched and graded by people who could and would make our lives a living hell if we made a scene, or embarrassed the school in any way. I doubt a plebe-year West Pointer could have done better that night.

Anyway, Rand read the menu and interpreted items, made suggestions, championed the proper way to hold escargot, and when Madeleine made noises about needing the powder room, Rand fired out of his chair so smartly he nearly knocked the thing over. He stood and watched her walk from the table, and I knew right then and there he was in love with her. Hell, who could blame him? We'd been locked away without so much as a Playboy magazine for ten weeks; we were all ready to explode on contact.

During all this, my mother might have been amused by Rand's smitten appearance but for the lingering malaise that seemed to hover somewhere just under her Chanel. She seemed distracted, indeed, almost worried, and I was suddenly ill-at-ease.

"I hear there's a dance after the game tomorrow," my mother said soon after Madeleine returned. "Rand, perhaps you'd be so kind? Would you take Madeleine under your wing and take her to the dance for me? There are some things I need to discuss with Todd, and as we're leaving early Sunday, I'm afraid I'll need to borrow him during that time." She blinked her soft eyes and smiled easily at him. "Would you be a dear and do that for me?"

"It would be my honor," Rand said; Madeleine and I tried our best not to laugh, but mother let slip and we all burst out laughing. It was, after all, getting hard to ignore the look in Madeleine's eyes too.

When we got back to the dorm later that night, Rand had mail waiting. He ripped open the letter from his mother while I undressed and hung up my uniform. I heard a sharp intake of breath and paper crumbling, turned in time to see Rand thunder from the room. I left the paper on the floor, looked at its malevolent form while I waited to find out what had happened. He came back a while later; he was red-faced, his jaw clenched, the muscles in his face working frantically. All the classic Rand-signs that the shit had well and truly hit the fan.

"What gives?" I said while he ripped his shirt off and threw it on the floor.

"My mom. She's fucking divorcing dad. Says she's getting married in Florida, during Christmas break." He flopped down on the bed, resumed that faraway stare. "Merry fucking Christmas!"

"Cripes," I managed to say, but I was nevertheless speechless. Divorce in those days was still something of an oddity, and with an uncertain frame of reference I just couldn't fathom what the words really meant to him, or me. Still, I could see the cold reality of those words playing out on Rand's face, and whatever was going on in there -- it wasn't pretty.

+++++

It still wasn't pretty Saturday morning while we suited up in the locker room; the pre-game butterflies were fluttering, but something vile and unsettling was crawling around Rand's gut, and I wasn't sure he was going to make it through the day. I was pretty certain he'd gotten up in the middle of the night to throw up, and I don't think either of us slept after that. Nevertheless, he was steady during pre-game warm-ups and brightened considerably when he saw Madeleine and my mother take their seats in the stands just above the home-team bench.

A stiff, cold breeze was coming out of the north when we kicked off; the kid returning the ball stumbled and got hammered, fumbled the ball on their thirty yard line. Harriman took the offense out on the field and called the first play of the game, lined up for the snap and fell back to pass. The defense blitzed everything they had and it was a miracle Tucker managed to hold on to the ball under the wave of maroon jerseys that crashed over him. He didn't stand up when the pile cleared and remained resolutely still while the huddle formed. Finally a referee blew his whistle and the team doc ran out on the field; he worked for a moment and Harriman stood and wobbled a few steps before going down for good, looking just like a sack of coal as he fell. A stretcher was summoned and Coach turned to Rand. They talked for a moment and Rand looked at me and smiled; the backfield coach popped me on the helmet and told me to 'get out on the field, Meathead' -- and I trotted out beside Rand and got in the huddle.