Scotty Mason woke with a bad headache -- again. It wouldn't go away. It was tormenting him. He'd had it for weeks. But today it was fierce. With each throb, he felt a spurt of real anger. He sat up and pulled a crumpled cigarette from the torn pack by the bedside and left iit in his mouth unlighted.
His hands turned into fists as he thought about it. But there was nothing to do. The bastard had outsmarted him.
He lit the match he was holding and put it to the bent edge of the cigarette.
The guy at the mall yesterday who got away, that fucking Derek.
He wanted to take that smartass kid and slam him against the wall, and hold him there while he taught him what it was to show some respect to your superiors.
He wanted to hold him against the wall by his throat and watch the kid quail.
He pulled himself out of bed, sat on the edge, took a few last drags on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the butt-filled ash-tray on the nightstand.
There was a thunderstorm and lightning outside, and rain was pelting the window panes.
Fuck, shit, fuck, he said as a hard stream of piss hit the water in the toilet bowl. What a lousy day to have to go out fishing.
He was way below his quota for the last three months, and every day he had to put up with being chewed out by the colonel. Stupid motherfucker, he didn't even know what it was like out there. Resistance was growing on the kids like a fungus.
He was alone for the weekend. Ryan was visiting his parents; Quincy, his girlfriend in Dallas.
He switched on the t v as he made a cup of instant coffee. He stood in front of it as he drank the insipid brew, still only in his khaki skivvies, mindlessly scratching his balls and cursing at the reporter who was highlighting the story. Two recruiters in Washington State got an autistic kid to sign up. Then they tried to tough it out while his family, the press, and finally his congressman made a holy stink about it.
He put his coffee cup down and lit another cigarette. They were accusing the recruiters of strong arm tactics and then knocking what the troops were doing in Iraq on top of it.
He knew he had to calm down. He had to be positive.
He crushed the cigarette, showered and shaved and got into his uniform and pulled himself together.
He stood in front of the mirror and saluted himself.
Mason! he said.
Yes, Sir, he answered.
A good start for the day was another cup of coffee and a donut inside the mall. No chance for a cigarette here. Saturday morning, the place has to be swarming with possibilities. Maybe even that prick Derek would show up.
He'd get in his face and not let him go this time. That was one kid he wanted to catch and sign up.
If he knew the kid's last name, he'd give him a call. Maybe one of those other cunts who hung out at the mall would know it.
He shut and opened his eyes, rubbed them, and then opened his hand and rubbed the sides of his face by the bone of the eye sockets with extended thumb and middle finger. He pulled himself together. He couldn't let himself zone out over his coffee. And he couldn't let himself keep thinking about Derek like this -- he was working. Yeah, but the thing with Derek was about work.
Mason looked around as if studying the mall's architecture.
A bunch of guys in baggy clothes stopped at the electronics store and messed around with each other, leaping and landing and yelping as they commented on the devices in the window.
He felt defeated before he began.
Gentleman, he said, despite his apprehension, as he approached the group.
You look like a team on the beam that wants to see some action.
Oh, no, one of them in a sleeveless shirt and a backwards baseball cap groaned, team on the beam. He walked away with a slouch.
We got our action, Dude. We don't want your kind of action, another one said, a hippie with an earring. Or may just a faggot.
I see how you're checking out all that equipment, Mason went on ignoring them, trying to find a hook. Well you ought to check out the army because the army's got some high tech stuff that'll make the stuff you're looking at in the window seem like black and white television.
But the kids weren't biting. He found himself in the ridiculous position of following after them. Gentlemen, he said, trying to get their attention, Dudes.
But they had no interest in paying attention to him, and as long as they did not get caught by him, he couldn't make them.
An army recruiter has mystical power. He is an archetype. He is the force that makes the landscape dangerous, the agent of a power that can transform your world from an open and free place where you belong to yourself to a lock-up where you belong to someone else who can dispose of you as he will, even unto death.
He was the agent of death, the lingering Erlking beckoning. He invited both defiance and surrender.
The more political among the kids organized demonstrations against the recruiters. But most of the kids kept their distance. Recruiters are dangerous.
And then there are those kids that get caught. Some think they want what the recruiters are selling. Others get bamboozled.
Standing in the center of the atrium, facing a store that sold leather fashions, Mason felt uncomfortable being himself. It wasn't like anything he had ever felt before. Properly, then he should not have known what it meant to feel the way he did. It ought to be an unidentifiable feeling. But it wasn't. It was a distinct feeling that told him he was uncomfortable being himself. He knew it.
He shook his head as if he wanted to shake such thoughts out of his head -- or as if he wanted to shake himself free of himself.
He needed to sit down someplace, to rest. He felt nausea.
In the Men's room, in a large stall with a toilet and a baby diaper changing table, he sat and bent forward and clasped his head in his hands.
This is very dangerous. You can get court-martialed for not following orders.
He stood. He became dizzy. He opened the door to the stall knowing he had to get out. He fell and hit the floor.
A kid on his way to pick up tickets for a Neil Young concert heard something as he passed the Men's room. Inside he found a soldier face down on the bathroom tile. Luckily Reese, the security guy, was right there, and he called the emergency squad. Mason was coming to, but was disoriented, had trouble speaking.
The transient ischemic attack was minor; to the extent that such things can ever be considered as not serious, it was not serious. But it was a warning. Mason knew by an intuition that had never before graced him. He was a tight fist of anger, all throughout his body. Everything about him was clenched.
You're no good to us, the colonel said. I have to be honest with you.
I guess I'm not much good to myself, either, Mason said.
That's no way to talk.
Yes, sir, Mason said, falling back on the only prop he knew, the discipline of taking orders.
No, no, Mason. You can't tough this one out. If you take my advice, you go get some counseling. It's rough out there. You'll get a medical discharge, no disgrace.
No disgrace. Ha! It was a big disgrace, and he knew it, and they knew it, and everybody knew it. But everybody was acting like nothing had happened, that a dream had not been shattered. The only thing he had ever wanted, really wanted, was to be among other guys like himself, to be one of a band of brothers sharing a noble purpose and bound together by their dedication to their duty and to each other. Instead of that he had to go cruising malls getting shit on by hippies, not even with a partner, like most guys, because there was a shortage of recruiters here. And what did it get him? Shit from little motherfuckers like Derek and condescension from his superior officers. And now he was nothing, absolutely nothing.
So for the first couple of weeks, he totally went to seed. He was ashamed to go outside. He spent days in bed. He didn't wash or shave. His hair grew long and shaggy. When he finally was ready to go out again, he didn't recognize himself when he looked in the bathroom mirror.
So much the better, he thought.
No risk anyone else will either, he figured.
He had the urge to drive over to the mall; so much had happened there. He needed to look around once more, to say good-bye.
How strange suddenly to need to say good-by to a place you didn't want to be.
Then, spontaneously, despite himself, it came to him even though he did not want it to, did not want to know what he realized he knew. It was not about the mall or about who he had been or what he had been doing. It was only one thing that mattered to him, one thing only that he wanted: it was that fucking Derek.
He wanted to see that guy in uniform, standing at attention, saluting him.
That prick had penetrated him and he couldn't do anything about it. If he had only gotten Derek to sign!
He stood by the soda machine looking at the floor and shaking his head. When he looked up he saw a bunch of kids across the way -- he recognized some of them -- looking at him, noticing him, unable to be sure they were seeing what they thought they were seeing.
He turned his back to them and walked quickly to the exit.
He was furious.
Life was hell all week.
It was beyond everything to find himself in this situation. Suddenly, something was caving in. He lay in bed in the one-room he was renting by the week, feeling his heart beat hard, and his stomach sour.
Derek. Derek was always with him, like a painfully throbbing wound.
But there was a shred of dignity he had left, and it lay in his training. Self-discipline saved him.
He pulled himself out of bed, showered, shaved. He needed a haircut. He put on fresh underwear, the same kind of khaki skivvies he always wore. But it wasn't the same any more. They were part of a uniform he wasn't allowed to wear anymore.
He had something to do. He had to go get a haircut and buy new underwear.
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