"Tonight. Tonight, sir."

"McLean," the Bear said gently, his cigar blazing. "You're acting like it was the first time, Bubba."

"It was, Colonel."

He reached into his uniform pocket and brought out a Thompson cigar from Tampa, Florida. "Congratulations, Bubba. That's like inventing the wheel."

I still have that cigar.

Chapter Thirty.

I remember the winter of my senior year as one of the happiest times of my life. My walk was springy and I seemed to be in perfect step with the universe. I was playing good ball; I was in love with Annie Kate Gervais; I was taking Sunday afternoon walks with Abigail; my grades were good and my classes stimulating; there was an extraordinary harmony and contentment among my roommates. Those were magic times in Charleston; the days were cold and short, the city awoke to ice, and I arose each morning at the first bugle, refreshed and eager and golden in the darkness of 6:15 in the morning, vigorous and ready for the gifts the day would bring. In January during a game with George Washington, I had thrown a pass to Johnny DuBruhl who had cut toward the basket. He had not seen the pass and it had careened off the top of his head, hit the high part of the backboard, and fallen softly through the net. The scorekeeper awarded me a basket and Johnny an assist. That's how it was in that radiant season.

Every small act became a celebration of sorts for me. I could be seen running to class and running to practice and running to my car. I did not want to miss anything. I wanted to taste it all, savor every experience, register every sight, smell, and taste of those months. Before each game, a high school girl, a basketball fan, would call me up in the barracks and tell me where on campus she had left a single red rose for me to find. I never met this girl even though I tried earnestly to arrange a meeting. But I would follow her directions and find a rose in the chapel before the Furman game, a rose carefully placed on a shelf in the library before we played Clemson, a rose floating in a fountain in the General's front yard before we played William and Mary, a rose pinned on the climbing rope of the obstacle course before the Auburn game. The roses were a symbol of my good fortune and I knew when the season ended there would be no more roses hidden for my pleasure by an enchanted, invisible stranger. But I wanted there always to be accidents and mysteries and roses in my life.

Since that time I have come to distrust periods of extreme happiness and now when I discover myself in the middle of one, I glance nervously around me, examine all locks, cut back all the shrubbery around my house, avoid introductions to strangers, and do not travel on airplanes. Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration, like an albino. Like the albino it has no protective coloration. White. That is the color. Those placid, untroubled winter months are different shades of white in my memory, unsullied, and pure. But nature in the temperate zones is bitter toward all things white.

I know the day when things began to change. But the change was so slight, so imperceptible, I did not sense the shift. On the day we played the final game of the season, against Virginia Military Institute, the call from the mystery girl came just before noon formation. She had placed the final rose on the windshield wiper of my car along with a note. In the note she wished me all the luck in the world and was sorry that she was not pretty enough to meet me or to get to know me. The note was incredibly poignant. It shimmered with the solitude of a damaged and imaginative girl. She spoke the truth. It was the last rose of that winter, and I never did hear from her again. I hoped she would find a good man whom she could meet face to face. The one thing I knew for certain is that he would find her pretty enough. Of that, I had no doubt. There was only one thing different in her final gift. Her last rose was white.

I was up before the bugle that morning, splashing cold water on my face at the sink when reveille sounded across the campus. Often, I arose early on the days of games, all eagerness and drive and nervous energy. But I was always at my best in the morning anyhow. I had the metabolism of a canary at reveille, bright and chirpy and preening before the mirror. I was talkative in the morning, alive and glowing, one of those dreadful people who were the scourge of the cadets who relished silence and time and vast quantities of caffeine before their bodies could adapt to the shock of marching through a sunless world. But I drew energy and sustenance from the surge of the Corps around me. I felt like whistling and singing and joking as soon as my feet hit the floor.

When the bugle sounded, Mark shouted, "Fuck."

Pig shouted, "Fuck."

Tradd said wearily, "Oh, God. Already?"

"Up and at 'em, boys and girls," I said gleefully. "Another big day at Disneyland."

"Shut up, asshole." Mark sighed, pulling a pillow over his head.

It was dangerous strategy to joke with Mark before noon formation. He had made it a law of the room that I was not to speak to him or even look at him in the morning. He was the only person I've ever known who could navigate four flights of winding stairs, march to the mess hall, and eat breakfast without ever once opening his eyes.

Before I could go over and shake my roommates into a state of semi-consciousness, Beasley, the knob, burst into the room to announce that the Bear had entered the barracks to check on seniors late for morning formation.

"Good lad, Beasley," I said. "Pass the word among the freshmen that I'll be down in a second and that I want them loud this morning. All right, beloved roommates, get out of the rack and onto the floor."

"Fuck you, asshole," Mark grumbled from beneath the pillow. Mark had never been on time to a formation since we had become seniors as far as I knew.

When I reached the quadrangle I looked around, trying to spot where the Bear was hiding. I did not see him, so I began to tease the R Company freshmen who were already lined like bottles in their respective squads. I was part of an early warning system that alerted sleeping seniors in the battalion when the Bear or a tactical officer slipped into the barracks to write up delinquency reports on tardy upperclassmen.

I walked to the front of the company area and faced the freshmen.

"Good morning, dumbheads," I shouted.

"Good morning, sir," they answered in unison.

"Isn't it great to be alive and a member of the Corps of Cadets?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," they roared.

"I love this place, dumbheads. I think I've found myself a home. Isn't it great to wake up on a freezing winter morning in pitch darkness? Don't you just love it, douchebags?"

"Yes, sir."

"All over America, dumbheads, on lesser college campuses, campuses that do not specialize in producing whole men, boys exactly your age are turning over in their sleep and touching the huge, succulent boobs of their girl friends and moaning that they have to get up for their first class at two o'clock in the afternoon. They're hung over from a frat party and an all-night sexual orgy that started while you were engaged in a sweat party on third division. Doesn't that sound disgusting, dumbheads? Can you imagine going to college to have fun? Pop off!"

"No, sir!" they shouted.

I smelled the cigar smoke in the dark morning air. I had been waiting for it.

"Do you know why I came to the Institute, scumbags? Pop off!"

"No, sir!" they replied.

"I wanted to model myself after a great man. I wanted to model myself after that paragon of military virtue, that officer who was wounded in the behind while fleeing the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge, that fighting man of such superlative qualities that he has returned to his alma mater as commandant in charge of discipline. I came to the Institute, dumbheads, because I wanted to be exactly like Colonel Thomas Berrineau, affectionately known as the Bear. Please give him a big round of applause, wad-wastes. This man is like a father to me."

The freshmen applauded loudly and stiffly. It is hard to be cheerful when you are bracing in twenty-degree weather.

"Good morning, Bubba," Colonel Berrineau said, stepping up beside me and examining the R Company freshmen.

"Good morning, Colonel," I said. "How can you smoke that thing at six-fifteen in the morning, sir?"

"It helps me get rid of the sickly sweet taste of toothpaste, lamb, and it helps young lambs like you to smell the Bear sneaking up behind you. I got to give you bums some kind of break."

Then in a loud, commanding voice he addressed the plebes in Romeo Company. If the Bear's voice did not wake the seniors, they were probably dead.

"Is this bum McLean spreading sedition among my lamblets? Pop off!"

"Yes, sir!" they roared.

"Just why are you down here so early, Mr. McLean?" the Bear asked me knowingly.

"Sir," I said, turning toward the plebes. "I'm down here because of my concern for these young dumbheads. Just look at them, sir. No pride, no spirit, no command presence to any of them. Now you and I are from the Old Corps, Colonel, and we are accustomed to a certain quality of douchebag that we are just not attracting to the Institute in these sad, decadent times. For instance, Jones. Where's my man Jones?"

An emaciated, bespectacled freshman from Atlanta stepped quickly forward from the second platoon. "Now, Colonel, when Mr. Jones was a young man he contracted polio of the face and had to wear a brace on his nose and upper lip for the first five years of his life. You'll notice that his nose still has a limp. Show the Colonel that painful limp in your left nostril, Jones."

Jones wrinkled his nose, rabbitlike, several times for effect.

"A terrible affliction, you will agree, Colonel," I continued. "But Jones has overcome it, much to his credit. He has to sleep with his nose suspended from a pulley but otherwise he's a model cadet, as I was when I was a freshman. What disturbed me about Jones, though, was when he told me he had applied for a job at the zoo shoveling elephant manure and was turned down. Finally, in desperation, he applied to the Institute and they gave him a four-year academic scholarship. Colonel, I tell you these are trying times."

"Young lamb," the Bear said to Jones, inspecting the freshman's twitchy nose more carefully. "Is that job at the zoo still open? We in the Commandant's Department have been worried about a career for Mr. McLean for quite some time."

The plebes shook with repressed, uncontainable laughter. The laughter of freshmen was a rare commodity on the quadrangle of the regiment.

Seniors were racing from their rooms from all over the barracks, tucking in their shirts as they came, shoes untied, hats askew, and eyes trained on their watches as they tried to outrun the final bugle that would make them late on the Bear's clipboard.

"You've got a good early warning system, Bubba," the Bear said, watching the harried movement of seniors.

"Are you going to the last game tonight?" I asked the Colonel.

"Sure, Bubba, I never miss a VMI game. I like to see what cadets from a good military college look like. How do you think our chances are?"

"They'll probably stomp us, Colonel," I answered. "The one thing the Institute has taught me is how to lose gracefully and often. Sir, I must bid you adieu. My squad is incomplete and anxious without me to bring up the rear on the march to mess."

"I'll see you at parade next Friday, McLean," he warned. "You'll be off orders then, and I'll be checking to make sure your squad is complete with a senior private who walks like a duck and carries an M-1 like it was radioactive."

"M-," I said, puzzled. "Isn't that a sauce you put on a steak?"

"No, it's something I'll put up your behind if you're not at that parade, Bubba."

"I can hardly wait to hear the drums roll and the guidons snap in the wind, Colonel. I've also hired a plane to seed the clouds and make it rain like hell that day so the damn thing will be canceled. I think it's a crime to make a jock go to parade for any occasion. We look silly out there, and people laugh at us and hurt our feelings."

The last bugle sounded. "By the way, Bubba," he whispered, walking to my platoon with me, "do you remember that ten I found painted on that freshman's door?"

"Vaguely," I said. "That was a long time ago."

"It looks like a coincidence," he said. "Some platoon sergeant painted that because it was the tenth knob that had been sent packing out of that company. I ended his career as an artist, but I wanted you to know that it looks like a false alarm."

"Colonel, I don't think we have anything to worry about anymore. Pearce has made it through the worst part of the year. It's getting toward the end of February, and I haven't even received a note from him in two months."

"We're just staying vigilant, Bubba. We're just getting Pearce through this school one day at a time. This is going to be the Year of the Nigger in the history of the Institute. Now get in line, Bubba. All the seniors made it to formation because of your big mouth. I won't report you for unshined shoes if we beat VMI tonight."

"We'll try, Colonel," I said, saluting him as he left the barracks.

That evening I walked through the front door of the Armory to play the last game I would ever play for Carolina Military Institute. I had come to the day when I would face the world without a sport. The Armory smelled of loss and passage and absent crowds; it shimmered with memories of old forgotten games and the death of athletes. Something vital in me would die on this night. I had come to my absolute limits as an athlete, and they were not very great.

Athlete. The very word was beautiful to me. I looked up at the scoreboard and thought, Has there ever been a boy who loved this game as much as I have loved it? I had known the praise of crowds and knew nothing else on earth to equal it. When I played basketball, I was possessed by a nakedness of spirit, an absolute purity, a divine madness when I was let loose to ramble between the lines. Always, I was reckless and moving at full speed, and I never learned the potency of stillness, the craft of subtlety. I had moved about the court for four years without control, as though I were racing from basket to basket putting out fires or hurling myself on live grenades. I had played the game the best I could but was beaten time and time again. But I had willed myself to be, if not gifted, at least someone to be watched closely, and at times when the ball came my way and I came at my opponents in full flight, an athlete to be feared. I could hurt them only with recklessness. There were times when they knew I was a burning boy, a dancing, roaring, skipping, brawling boy-moments of pure empyrean magic when the demon of sport was born in the howl of my bloodstream, when my body and the flow of the game commingled in a wild and accidental mating and I turned into something I was never meant to be: an athlete who could not be stopped, a dreaded and respected gamesman loose and rambling on the court. I remembered those moments because there were so few of them and because the sport had tamed me with the knowledge of my own limitations, my earnest mediocrity. Yet, while controlling the flow of games with the unstealable dribble, I had been more truly alive than I would ever be again. I had learned that my grace came only in the full abandoned divinity of flight. I had known the joy, the pure orgasmic joy of the dance. It was a day of last roses, last dances.

As I walked toward the locker room, I thought about how I feared things being irrevocably finished. Had it been that long ago that I first entered this gymnasium as a freshman? Its size had startled me, its aura of seriousness and the big time. Had it been that long ago that I was eighteen? How could a human being deal with such swiftness, with such unrecallability?

I entered the dressing room, steamy from the overworked radiators, noisy with the nervous banter of the team dressing.

"Big Bo," I said, acknowledging Bo Maybank, who was wrapping the ankles of Doug Cumming on the training table.

"Will," he said, pleased to see me. "I won five bucks from Doug a half-hour ago. I made ten straight set shots from the top of the key."

"Never bet with midgets, Will," Doug said, slapping at my behind as I passed them on the way to my locker. Athletes have a strange but genuine compulsion to touch each others asses.

I paused by Reuben Clapsaddle, who was lacing up his size eighteen shoes.

"My, what big feet you have, Grandma," I said.

"All the better to stomp little guards with, my dear," Reuben answered.

Johnny DuBruhl, the other starting guard and an inch shorter than I was, came up behind me and gave me a stinging slap on the rump. "Hurry up, little man, we've got a ball game to play and I've got a date after the game."

"You ought to see the girl, Will," Doug Cumming shouted from the training table.

"Don't move 'til I finish taping your ankles, Doug," Bo commanded.

Doug continued, "There's been a breakout at the zoo, man."

"Eat me, Cumming," Johnny shouted across the locker room.

"Hey, Doug," Dave Dunbar, a second string forward who was from the same Ohio town as Johnny, said, "do you know what Johnny's girl does for a living? She's got a real good job, man. They test new treads on tanks by running over her face before they send them out to the field."

"At least I've got a date," Johnny said. "That's more than I can say for the rest of you horny bastards."

"I thought I saw Johnny with a girl after the last game," Dave said. "But then I looked again and saw that I was mistaken."

"How'd you know you were wrong, Dave?" I asked.

"I drove past them in my Volkswagen and she chased after the car barking," he answered.

"I know you guys are just jealous," Johnny said. "I'm out there getting it while you guys are back in the barracks wearing one white glove."

Reuben changed the subject by saying, "Did you hear that Johnson of '65 got killed in Vietnam, Will?"

"No," I answered, with real shock.

"Both co-captains of the '65 football team were killed within a week of each other. You knew that McBride was killed in a firefight near Da Nang last week," Johnny continued, twirling a basketball expertly on his index finger. "Those were two really good guys. Its funny. It's kind of normal when I hear about regular Joes from the Corps getting zapped, but it always sort of surprises me when a jock has his brains blown out."

"Maybe basketball players just don't give a damn about this country," a high-pitched voice said from near the equipment room. It was Bo Maybank, and his tiny rodent's face was flushed with anger and the emotion of speaking something he had wanted to say to us for a long time.

"Oh, oh," Johnny said, laughing, "I got the Midget started on Vietnam."

"Speak for yourself, Bo," Reuben said, staring at the manager.

"The Big Fella ain't playing no hide and seek with the little yellow people. That's a war for military dicks and Lilliputians."

"You don't mind other people getting killed for you, I guess, Reuben?" Bo muttered in a trembling, barely audible voice, nervously searching the room for allies.

"Just shut up and wrap ankles like a good little duckbutt," Doug said.

"I don't mind other people getting killed for Big Reuben," said Reuben. "Shit, I was so happy when I found out that I was too tall to get drafted that I almost went out and bought me a new record. Can you see me in Nam, Bo? I'd be dead in a fucking week. It's hard to be quiet in the jungle when you're six foot ten, man. The Vietcong would hear my big feet coming ten miles away. I could just see me on my tippy-toes trying to keep quiet. Crunch-Crunch-Crunch. They'd see me coming, stop eating rice for a sec, go blow fucking Reuben's legs off, then go back and make up a new batch of soy sauce. No sir, I'm happy to be six-ten and leave the fighting to you little poots."

"Let's think about VMI, boys," I said, amazed at my own sanctimonious tone.

"That's right, guys," Bo said penitently. "I shouldn't have started that before a game. The important thing now is the game. Will's right. I'm sorry. No kidding. I'm really sorry."