The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates Read Free Book Online Page B

only meant you were a kid who didn’t know the score, and nobody wanted to be that. Secretly we may have yearned for battle, or at least for ribbons, but on the surface we were shameless little wise guys about everything. Trying to make us soldiers must have been a staggering job, and Reece bore the brunt of it.
    But of course that side of the thing didn’t occur to us, at first. All we knew was that he rode us hard and we hated his guts. We saw very little of our lieutenant, a plump collegiate youth who showed up periodically to insist that if we played ball with him, he would play ball with us, and even less of our company commander (I hardly remember what he looked like, except that he wore glasses). But Reece was always there, calm and contemptuous, never speaking except to give orders and never smiling except in cruelty. And we could tell by observing the other platoons that he was exceptionally strict; he had, for instance, his own method of rationing water.
    It was summer, and the camp lay flat under the blistering Texas sun. A generous supply of salt tablets was all that kept us conscious until nightfall; our fatigues were always streaked white from the salt of our sweat and we were always thirsty, but the camp’s supply of drinking water had to be transported from a spring many miles away, so there was a standing order to go easy on it. Most noncoms were thirsty enough themselves to construe the regulation loosely, but Reece took it to heart. “If yew men don’t learn nothin’ else about soldierin’,” he would say, “you’re gonna learn water discipline.” The water hung in Lister bags, fat canvas udders placed at intervals along the roads, and although it was warm and acrid with chemicals, the high point of every morning and every afternoon was the moment when we were authorized a break to fill our canteens with it. Most platoons would attack a Lister bag in a jostling wallowing rush, working its little steel teats until the bag hung limp and wrinkled, and a dark stain of waste lay spreading in the dust beneath it. Not us. Reece felt that half a canteenful at a time was enough for any man, and he would stand by the Lister bag in grim supervision, letting us at it in an orderly column of twos. When a man held his canteen too long under the bag, Reece would stop everything, pull the man out of line, and say, “Pour that out. All of it.”
    â€œI’ll be goddamned if I will!” D’Allessandro shot back at him one day, and we all stood fascinated, watching them glare at each other in the dazzling heat. D’Allessandro was a husky boy with fierce black eyes who had in a few weeks become our spokesman; I guess he was the only one brave enough to stage a scene like this. “Whaddya think I am,” he shouted, “a goddamn camel, like you?” We giggled.
    Reece demanded silence from the rest of us, got it, and turned back to D’Allessandro, squinting and licking his dry lips. “All right,” he said quietly, “drink it. All of it. The resta yew men keep away from that bag, keep your hands off your canteens. I want y’all to watch this. Go on, drink it.”
    D’Allessandro gave us a grin of nervous triumph and began to drink, pausing only to catch his breath with the water dribbling on his chest. “Drink it,” Reece would snap each time he stopped. It made us desperately thirsty to watch him, but we were beginning to get the idea. When the canteen was empty Reece told him to fill it up again. He did, still smiling but looking a little worried. “Now drink that,” Reece said. “Fast. Faster.” And when he was finished, gasping, with the empty canteen in his hand, Reece said, “Now get your helmet and rifle. See that barracks over there?” A white building shimmered in the distance, a couple of hundred yards away. “You’re gonna proceed on the double to that barracks, go around it and