"My mother was a Cain," he answered. "Cain of Virginia."

"That's real swell. I'm beginning to like the aristocracy. Cain of Virginia, huh?"

"How'd you get your name, big fella? How do the lower classes name their children?"

"Haphazardly, son, haphazardly."

Cain ignored me and strained to hear the voices of the cadre who were conducting a surreptitious "sweat party" in the fourth division shower room. Whenever the hazing was particularly barbaric, it was an intelligent command decision to conduct it far from the eyes of the Officer in Charge. I had become so accustomed to the shouts of the cadre that I no longer even heard them. But Cain was right in his perception that some innate change had taken place in the nature of the tumult down the gallery. Something had gone wrong. It was as if a wasps' nest had been set on fire and thrown into the ranks of the plebes. The noise was chaos, not discipline, not training, not the institutional fear that was the darker constant of the plebe system. Cain and I looked at each other for a single uncomprehending moment before John Kinnell, the R Company commander, burst into the room.

"Will. Will. Here quick. Get out here in a hurry."

"Why, John? What's going on?"

"Poteete is over the rail. He says he's going to jump."

I sprinted out the door and was met by a great surge of freshmen being herded to their rooms, away from the pandemonium, away from the lone plebe who had in one moment of anarchy stepped out of the control of the system. Six members of the cadre formed a loose, indecisive semicircle around Poteete, who was hanging off the railing with one hand and foot suspended over the hundred-foot drop to the concrete quadrangle. He was shouting for them to keep back or he would jump at that moment.

"Get back, you motherfuckers!" he screamed over and over again. With each scream, the cadre retreated. The plebe had become commander.

"He said he wanted to see you, Will," I heard John Kinnell say behind me.

On the quadrangle, upperclassmen ran out to get an unimpeded view of Poteete. Pandemonium cut loose in every square foot of the barracks; the Officer of the Guard tried to clear the quadrangle of cadets, but the surge of the crowd overwhelmed him. From every direction fingers pointed at Poteete. He was the single focus of a thousand eyes. Even the freshmen were peering out of their rooms for a glimpse of the plebe who had cracked.

"Get everybody out of sight, John," I said. "It's like a goddam circus down there."

"All R Company men report to your rooms," John called out. He had a marvelous voice for cadence, for the issuance of command. I heard the other company commanders ordering their men to the darkness beneath the galleries. Over the loudspeaker, I heard the voice of Jimmy Bull, the fourth battalion commander, say, "All members of fourth battalion report to your rooms immediately." But though the cadets of fourth battalion would disappear into the shadows, they would not relinquish their roles as spectators, as rabid fans of the new barracks sport of suicide.

"Stop him, Will. He'll listen to you," John whispered as he withdrew.

"The plebe system builds men," I whispered back, hoping that the sarcasm would help allay my trembling. The trembling increased as I faced Poteete and our eyes met. He was weeping. Tears and fury and despair had intermingled in a violent desperate trinity, and now he was hanging out over the quadrangle. He was the first freshman I had ever known to freeze the cadre into complete impotence. By this time, the chain of command had regained control, and a fearful, unnatural silence gripped the barracks. Beneath the galleries, I could see the glow of cigarettes betraying the presence of upperclassmen. Poteete had centered himself in an arch in the area between O and R companies. The sobs broke out of him in regular intervals, loud, and infinitely sad.

"Don't come any closer, Mr. McLean," he said.

I did not realize that I had been moving.

"Well, Poteete," I said, with absolutely no sense or instinct about how to begin this confrontation. "What's up in the old freshmen class?"

"You can shove this school up your ass, Mr. McLean!" The power of the system had not completely broken down. He was still addressing me as "mister."

"It wouldn't fit, Poteete."

"How can you always joke about this place?" he said between sobs. "How can you think anything here is funny?"

"It was the only way I could make it through here. If I couldn't have found this place hilarious then I would have done something silly like trying to jump off the fourth division. This is going to seriously hurt your chances for rank, Poteete."

I leaned up against the arch nearest him. His eyes appraised my every movement. He had fixed a proper distance for me to remain, a zone of separation that he intended to honor.

"Don't move any closer, sir. I mean it. I'm going to jump. I promise you that. You can't do anything to stop me. I just wanted to talk to you. I wanted to find out how you could survive all of this. How could you survive such cruelty? You're just like me, Mr. McLean. I could never do this to other freshmen. I know I couldn't do this to anyone. I didn't know this was such a hateful place. My daddy never told me it was hateful."

"That's not his fault, Poteete. I've seen that over and over again. Grads only remember the good parts of their plebe year. They even laugh like hell when they do remember the bad parts. What seems horrible to you tonight will seem hilarious a year from now. That's the way it happens. That's the way the system works."

"Did it work that way for you?"

"No. The bad parts still seem bad to me."

"Were they like this to you, Mr. McLean? Were they as cruel to you as they've been to me?"

"Will. Call me Will, Poteete. What's your first name?"

"It doesn't make any difference. No one's called me by my first name since I've been here. Not even my roommate."

"They weren't as bad with me, Poteete. I told you that they would never let you alone if you cried."

"I can't help it, Will," he said, breaking down again. "I just can't help it. I've tried to stop. I've tried everything I know to stop. They scream at me all the time. They scream and scream and scream. They humiliate me. They humiliate me more than the other freshmen. My classmates want me to leave more than the cadre."

"I'd like you to leave, too, Poteete, but for entirely different reasons."

"You don't think I belong here either, Will?" Poteete asked gently. "You don't think I'm man enough to make it through the plebe system? Tell me how you made it. What was it like when you were a knob?"

"They were always comparing me to Douglas MacArthur and the Duke of Wellington because of my incredible military bearing."

He smiled and looked down from the dizzying heights where he stood, this sudden prince of the fourth battalion. I could see the red and white squares illuminated by eight floodlights on the top of the barracks. In the silence of the barracks, Poteete was trying to decide what to do. He had narrowed his field of vision down to two choices and two choices only He had reduced his life to the simplest common denominator. He was becoming extraordinarily calm, and I feared his calm as it settled over him more than I feared his hysteria. I had a thought that I should rush him now, while he was preoccupied with the casual study of the alien terrain where his spirit had broken up into irreversibly fragmented parts. I wondered how many boys had broken under the fearful pressures of the plebe system. I wondered if the grotesque phantoms of their damaged spirits haunted the alcoves of the barracks for all times, recruiting others into their defiled tormented ranks with howls of gratitude as they watched the others come apart at the soul. The ague of suffering raged unchecked in the eyes of the recruit. Behind Poteete's eyes, the hive of terror was loose on him and each cell in his brain had become wasp-winged and deadly, each cell was hourglass-shaped, and each cell, tremulous with the diminutive thunder of hornets, felt the power of flight and the invulnerability of the swarm. His eyes blazed in the glare of the floodlights. I did not rush him when I saw his eyes look at me. All was madness there, and loathing for me and what I represented. He meant to jump.

"What does your father do for a living, Poteete?" I said when he did not answer me. "You told me he graduated in 1947, but you never told me what he did for a living."

"He's a banker. President of the First National Bank of Pickens, South Carolina. I'm majoring in business administration here. He wants me to go back and work in the bank when I graduate."

"Sounds like you've got it made, man. Get out of college and walk into a bank you'll own someday. Is your mother from Pickens?"

"She's from Greenville. Her father owns a mill near Greenville. Greenville's got more mills than pine trees, my mother used to say. She used to say that all the time. I'd always thought I'd rather work in the mill than try to get along with Daddy in the bank. Daddy's a good man but I don't think we could work together."

"You've got it figured good, Poteete. Hell, I don't have any idea what I'm going to do after graduation and I'm a senior. You've got two fine jobs just waiting for you. You've got it made, man. You've got everything going for you."

"I've got nothing going for me," he said. "I don't have a single thing going for me. When I left home, my daddy told me that I'd better finish the first year. He didn't care if I quit the Institute after I proved I was man enough to go through the plebe system. I can't even take it for two weeks."

"There are other companies in the Corps, Poteete. Lots of other companies. They can transfer you down to first battalion tonight. I promise. Not all the companies are like R Company. There are some companies that don't give a shit about anything. Man, it's easy living up in 'Gentlemen First,' Poteete. Knobs up there think they've died and gone to heaven."

Poteete turned and studied me carefully. Except for the trembling, I was motionless beside the column.

"Do you know that most of my classmates think you're really fucked up, Mr. McLean?" Poteete said.

"A lot of my classmates think that I'm really fucked up," I answered.

"They think you're fucked up because you're nice to them and don't scream at them and don't make them do pushups. What kind of school is it when you hate somebody who doesn't scream at you?"

"You don't understand this school yet, Poteete? America is in short supply of assholes so it needs military schools like this to replenish the ranks. But the place is getting better. I swear it is. You still have your Snipeses. But you'll always have bastards like that. When I was a knob they had guys that would parboil newborn babies for sport. There was a supply sergeant my freshman year who got his kicks by tying little hamsters to parachutes made out of handkerchiefs. Then he would come up to the fourth division here and throw the hamster high up in the air. The hamster would go up about one hundred fifty feet, then drop down about eighty feet before the parachute would pop open and the hamster would land safely on the quadrangle. Two guys on the cadre would be waiting on the quad and they would stomp the hamster to death with their boots if it made a safe landing. But the real sport-and why the supply sergeant loved it so much-was when there was a malfunction in the little parachute and one of them wouldn't open and the hamster would fall all the way, with the whole battalion screaming it down."

"Will they scream me down?" Poteete asked coldly. His voice had gone beyond emotion, into a place beyond redemption.

"Poteete, no one wants you to jump. There's not a single person in this barracks who wouldn't do anything to see you come back over the rail. Not a single one. You made the mistake I did when I was a knob. You took it seriously. You didn't treat it as a game."

"I don't like the game, Will. It seems too serious. Some of the cadre meant everything they said to me. Some of them hate me because I'm fat and ugly and don't look good in the stinking uniform. I thought I could make it. I thought I was doing better until they took me to the house."

"What house?" I asked.

"You know what house," he said sharply. "The one where they take freshmen."

"You mean to someone's room?"

"I couldn't stand what they were doing to me. They treated me worse than if I was an animal."

"What house, Poteete? What are you talking about?"

In the shadows behind Poteete I saw the almost imperceptible movements of someone coming slowly along the rail, moving with infinite patience, silent as a lynx. Instantly, I looked away and pointed to a spot on the quadrangle.

"I spent the worst year of my life right there, Poteete, not too far from where you stand, in second platoon. I thought the year would never end. I thought it would last forever. Then when it was over, I thought it was the quickest year I had ever spent in my life. I learned something about time that year and how it works and what it means. Nothing lasts, Poteete. Whatever made you go over the rail tonight won't last either."

"I'm not going back with them."

"Who, Poteete?"

"I don't know who, McLean. Goddam, I don't know anything. But I can feel them watching me. I know some of them are down there and I can feel their hatred. Do you know what else I feel? I can feel my father's eyes watching me. I can hear him calling me a baby. I can hear my mother and father arguing about me. Him blaming her. Her blaming him. Who spoiled me? Who ruined me? Who did this and who did that? Who did too much and who didn't do enough? Whose side of the family I take after? What went wrong?"

"Your parents would both want you inside the rail."

"I can't now."

The barracks were silent. Stars spoke the language of light years, mutely, dimly above the barracks. Stars, arches, stone, cadre, Poteete, me, and death. I struggled for the right words, the life-preserving words to leap from my tongue. I was nauseated; I was afraid. The figure in the shadow moved inexorably toward us. I followed his progress peripherally. When he was ten feet away, I saw that it was Pig. Behind him, keeping to the shadow of the arches, crept Mark.

"Why, Poteete? All you've got to do is come over the rail. Just give me your hand and I'll help you."

"They'll laugh at me if I don't jump. They think I'm a pussy because I cry easily. I've got to prove to them that I have courage, too."

"That's nonsense. That's bullshit, Poteete. You let them feed you with all that bullshit and you bought it all," I said, sweeping my hand around the barracks in a gesture of disgust. "None of this makes any difference at all."

"It makes a difference to me," he shouted back. "There's no way out of this, Will. There's no way out of this with honor. Think of an honorable way for me to come back over the rail and I'll do it."

"This has nothing to do with being brave or manly or honorable or anything. This has everything to do with being human and being scared and having your world turned upside down and being humiliated. This has everything to do with your being better than us, Poteete. You can't endure the life in the barracks because you are infinitely superior to all of us."

"I'm afraid," Poteete said. "I've been afraid ever since I came here."

"All the freshmen are afraid. They're supposed to be afraid. They're supposed to be afraid out of their minds."

"I'm that afraid, Will," he said. "I'm scared out of my mind. Tell me how to get out of this, Will. I want to walk away from this. But I want to do it honorably. I don't want them screaming at me or laughing at me."

"Pig, Mark, and I will walk you out of the barracks, Poteete. If anyone laughs I'll set my roommates on them. They'll want to help you. I promise that. We'll get you out of here. I'll get the Bear to telephone your father and say you're getting expelled from school for beating the hell out of half the cadre the first week and the other half the second week. We'll tell him you broke the first sergeant's jaw. That you're too goddam tough to live in the barracks, that they ought to buy you a cage in Pickens and feed you raw meat and live ammunition."

"He'd like that, wouldn't he?" Poteete said, smiling at the thought. "But then he'd hear from someone. I sometimes wish that I came from New York City instead of Pickens. My father doesn't understand why anyone would want to live in a city with eight million other people. I've always understood it."

"Poteete, come in off the rail. I'll buy you a goddam ticket to New York City. I'll rent you an apartment. I'll buy you furniture."

"I can't. I can't turn back now," he said, looking straight down toward the perfectly congruent geometry of the quadrangle.

At that moment, Pig was on him. He grabbed Poteete fully around the chest and jerked him backward, trying to lift him over the rail. Mark leaped over the rail and seized one of Poteete's legs. I got a hand on Poteete s belt and in the midst of the violent crazed thrashing we lifted him over the rail and pinned him against the cement gallery. There was a rush of footsteps on the stairway. A hundred cadets surrounded us in a matter of seconds.

"Pussy."

"Fucking pussy," some of them sneered.

"Shut up!" I screamed.

"Shut up!" Pig screamed and they shut up.

Two orderlies from the guardroom brought a stretcher and we strapped Poteete to it, kicking and screaming and delirious now. In his screams, all the demons and the implacable cruelty of the Institute were contained in their purest, most essential form. I went over to speak to him before they took him to the hospital. Above the tumult, loose now upon the barracks with upperclassmen pressing forward to get a glimpse of the freshman who had silenced the system for a full fifteen minutes, I tried to speak to Poteete.

"I'm sorry, Poteete. It was the only way."

He stopped screaming for a moment. He looked at me and he looked at the mob that surrounded him. He looked back at me. His eyes and the wildness of the secret hive again blazed in frenzied dissociation.

"McLean," he said, his voice filled with loathing.

Then he spit in my face.

The next morning when the nurse at the infirmary brought him his breakfast, she found Poteete hanging from one of the heating pipes that traversed the ceiling of his room. He had hanged himself with his own uniform belt. I saw Poteete's father when he came onto campus to identify and claim the body of his son. He was the classic Institute man, erect, lean, and successful. When I saw him he was coming out of the infirmary. He did not look to the left or the right. His wife was weeping inside their Lincoln Continental. I wanted to ask her how it was to be married to a member of the class of 1947, a legend in his own time. I tried to get up enough courage to talk to them, but I could summon up neither courage nor talk. And I saw something in his father's face that made me glad I would never talk to the man in my entire life. I saw shame. I saw naked embarrassment for the weakness of his son.

I read about the funeral in the newspaper. They did not mention how Poteete had died, but I learned that his first name was John, and that his friends had called him "Bucky."

Chapter Fifteen.

Taps sounded over the barracks. The music of sleep, the music of death, the song that extinguished every light in every room at the Institute. It was light-killing music that brought the coming of the small night creatures with it. In the silence following taps, I went out onto fourth division and stared out over the quadrangle. I was standing in the same spot where Poteete had threatened to jump. In this repose, as cadets began their seven hours and fifteen minutes of officially sanctioned sleep, the insects cautiously came alive to begin their night rule of the barracks. There was the faint rustle of small wings, the secret transit of spiders, the waxy promenades of huge roaches down the concrete galleries, the sudden blaze of fireflies, and sometimes the brown speed of rats scuttling toward garbage. Though the barracks gave the appearance that it could support no animal life at all, the small things had adapted themselves to a frantic existence between taps and reveille. Taps sounded by moonlight, by starlight, when owls swept low over the barracks, when the barracks looked as though it was carved from glaciers and the galleries looked like tiered cakes of gauzy ice. When reveille broke through the sweltering film of morning, the insects and rodents had retired to their secret places and the cadets assumed primacy once again.

I thought about the first fifteen days of my senior year and tried to consider all that was contained and implied in that period. At the Institute, I had learned to be cautious, to distrust the insistence of my own convictions, to cover my tracks, to walk invisibly through the Corps, without drawing too much attention to myself. I had disobeyed my own commandment; I was feeling naked, exposed, and vulnerable. Events had dominated me, forced me into the open terrain, flushed me from the main body of the Corps. As I stood there alone in the darkness, I could not dispel a feeling that something was going to happen to me that I had not prepared for, that I had to ready myself for surprise, for an attack on my flanks. Swarming about me were the disembodied faces of Annie Kate, Pearce, the Bear, the General, Abigail, Poteete, Alexander-faces, faces, faces, too many of them at once. I could not concentrate on any one face. I could not tell which face contained the elements of danger or which redemption. I could not tell which face or faces had given birth to my sense of foreboding. So I returned to the pretty face of Annie Kate Gervais. Again and again and again.

I did not hear Mark come up behind me. I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned toward him to see his dark scowling eyes appraising me. He had the somber eyes of an assassin in love with a cause. His hand moved along my shoulder to my neck. Then he cuffed me playfully on the head.

"Talk!" he ordered.

"Talk about what?" I asked.

"When I worry about things, I talk to you. When you worry, you come out here and stare at the quadrangle. What you're telling me is that I trust you a lot more than you trust me."