Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates Read Free Book Online Page B

gonna proceed on the double to that barracks, go around it and come back on the double. Meantime your buddies’re gonna be waitin’ here; ain’t none of ’em gonna get nothin’ to drink till yew get back. All right, now, move. Move . On the double .”
    In loyalty to D’Allessandro none of us laughed, but he did look absurd trotting heavily out across the drill field, his helmet wobbling. Before he reached the barracks we saw him stop, crouch, and vomit up the water. Then he staggered on, a tiny figure in the faraway dust, disappeared around the building, and finally emerged at the other side to begin the long trip back. At last he arrived and fell exhausted on the ground. “Now,” Reece said softly. “Had enough to drink?” Only then were the rest of us allowed to use the Lister bag, two at a time. When we were all through, Reece squatted nimbly and drew half a canteen for himself without spilling a drop.
    That was the kind of thing he did, every day, and if anyone had suggested he was only doing his job, our response would have been a long and unanimous Bronx cheer.
    I think our first brief easing of hostility toward him occurred quite early in the training cycle, one morning when one of the instructors, a strapping first lieutenant, was trying to teach usthe bayonet. We felt pretty sure that in the big, modern kind of war for which we were bound we probably would not be called on to fight with bayonets (and that if we ever were it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference whether we’d mastered the finer points of parry and thrust), and so our lassitude that morning was even purer than usual. We let the instructor talk to us, then got up and fumbled through the various positions he had outlined.
    The other platoons looked as bad as we did, and faced with such dreary incompetence on a company scale the instructor rubbed his mouth. “No,” he said. “No, no, you men haven’t got the idea at all. Fall back to your places and sit down. Sergeant Reece front and center, please.”
    Reece had been sitting with the other platoon sergeants in their customary bored little circle, aloof from the lecture, but he rose promptly and came forward.
    “Sergeant, I’d like you to show these people what a bayonet is all about,” the instructor said. And from the moment Reece hefted a bayoneted rifle in his hands we knew, grudgingly or not, that we were going to see something. It was the feeling you get at a ball game when a heavy hitter selects a bat. At the instructor’s commands he whipped smartly into each of the positions, freezing into a slim statue while the officer crouched and weaved around him, talking, pointing out the distribution of his weight and the angles of his limbs, explaining that this was how it should be done. Then, to climax the performance, the instructor sent Reece alone through the bayonet course. He went through it fast, never off balance and never wasting a motion, smashing blocks of wood off their wooden shoulders with his rifle butt, driving his blade deep into a shuddering torso of bundled sticks and ripping it out to bear down on the next one. He looked good. It would be too much to say that he kindled our admiration, but there is an automatic pleasure in watching athing done well. The other platoons were clearly impressed, and although nobody in our platoon said anything, I think we were a little proud of him.
    But the next period that day was close-order drill, at which the platoon sergeants had full command, and within half an hour Reece had nagged us into open resentment again. “What the hell’s he think,” Schacht muttered in the ranks, “he’s some kind of a big deal now, just because he’s a hotshot with that stupid bayonet?” And the rest of us felt a vague shame that we had so nearly been taken in.
    When we eventually did change our minds about him, it did not seem due, specifically, to any act of his, but to an experience that changed our minds about the Army in general,