When one Thanksgiving he single-handedly captured an AWOL sailor and escorted him to the brig at the nearby base, I began to study him in the hope he held the key to escaping my cowardice.
I delivered papers in the evening and, as the year grew late, was often overtaken on my bicycle by darkness and by fear. I flung my rolled papers toward porches and stoops and onto lawns, and I was sometimes pursued by dogs, once taken down in an explosion of snow and bicycle wheels by a wolfish Irish setter. I had a recurrent fantasy of a muscular ostrich pursuing me in the dark and pecking down through my skull into my brain, another of several fears stemming from my single childhood trip to the zoo.
I always delivered my papers as promptly as possible; the drum major delivered his whenever he felt inclined to do so. One afternoon in early October, he unexpectedly chose to address me; he accused me of making him look bad by getting my papers onto people’s porches and lawns before his. When I tried to respond, he cut me off and directed me to wait until his papers had been delivered before delivering mine. I complied with his instructions, tossing my papers onto lawns at all hours and dodging any customers who tried to complain.
I went to great lengths to observe the drum major practice on the big windblown and sometimes snowblown football field, where he would strut toward the goalposts trailing a stingy cape, the gray wintry lake just beyond, twirling his baton, the white shako tilted back arrogantly, culminating in the blissful high toss and recapture of the spinning chrome-plated baton, preferably without getting beaned by one of its white rubber ends. At actual game time, when he was leading our cacophonous marching band in disordered frenzy, the entire drama depended on his actually catching the baton, so that what was meant to accent a larger spectacle became the focal point of an otherwise lurching rigmarole. There was something about his haughty gaits and their seeming disconnection from the confused uproar of the band behind him, in its modest and unattractive costumes — threadbare maroon with gold piping, led by a hugely overweight youngster doing a Grambling State — style shimmy while flogging his glockenspiel with a felt-covered hammer — that was more attractive to a modest crowd that sometimes threw horse chestnuts at the drum major.
What lay behind this behavior? I think drum majors were about to be replaced by majorettes and what had once been honorably athletic had become effete and clouded with some unspoken sexual ambiguity, however inappropriate with reference to our own drum major, all of whose pert and blossoming girlfriends seemed to wind up losing their reputations. Nevertheless, the crowd hoped for a humiliating disaster. I, strangely, hoped for his success: I waited for that high toss to produce, as though by the hand of Praxiteles, the most graceful division of space, a split second of immortality for the drum major and for me a lesson in courage. At the same time, another part of me shared the crowd’s unspoken wish to see the drum major on all fours with the baton up his behind or wrapped around his neck. As would become habitual for most of us, we wanted either spectacular achievement or mortifying failure, one or the other. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us: we’d be allowed the frictionless lives of the meek.
Our school played Flat Rock on the last Saturday of October, when winter was already in the air, the trees shabby with half-shed leaves. I was shivering in the crowd on the rickety exposed bleachers, watching our band wheel onto the field. When the drum major at last tossed the baton in its high glitter, it fell so far behind him that he had to dash into the band to retrieve it. Too late: he was swept aside, forced to stand, hands on hips, until the musicians had passed, his baton on the ground bent like a pretzel. I admit that I joined the baying crowd, our community. As he bent to pick up his bit of wreckage, we were beside ourselves. In that uproar I was without fear. I thrilled to the courage of the mob. Still, it wasn’t quite the courage I was looking for.
The following week, the drum major seemed even more isolated at school, though as always he seemed to expect this. Mrs. Andrews, the beautiful young wife of our thuggish football coach who had given up her own remarkable athletic skills to teach us history, made a special effort to console him; I remember how gently she bent beside his desk to correct his work while, across the aisle, Stanley Peabody, with his flattop, pegged charcoal pants, and Flagg Flyer blue suede shoes, attempted to see down her blouse. Mrs. Andrews, with shining auburn hair piled atop her head, a single strand of imitation pearls curling down from her throat, was accustomed to being ogled and seemed to know Stanley only by a quick glance at the roster taped to her desk.
I was surprised by the attention she paid the drum major. From then on, I was a great student of any and all interactions between him and Mrs. Andrews, viewed as scarlet with erotic undertones, and abetted by the smirking of the other boys. But their behavior was no more than a salute to Mrs. Andrews’s lovely figure. One incident does stand out, when, after long abstaining, Mrs. Andrews first called on the drum major in class. By now, I believed I sensed something quiet and subtle between the two of them.
“What,” she asked, looking straight over the top of his head of curly brown hair, “was the principal result of the Credit Mobilier Scandal?” She seemed timid.
Legs stretched in the aisle, crossed at the ankles, fingers laced behind his head, the drum major said, “You tell me.” He gazed at her with quiet annoyance that seemed to intimate possession.
We felt an electric silence, and I thrilled to what I viewed as amorous badinage disguised as classwork. Mrs. Andrews’s face colored to the roots of her auburn hair. Stanley Peabody peered broadly. His sidekick, Boly Cardwell, a prematurely wizened teen with lank blond hair cascading over his forehead, grabbed his crotch surreptitiously and rolled his eyes in feigned ecstasy.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you feel I have asked you the wrong question.”
“Could be.” The drum major had the affectless James Dean look down pat.
“In that case, why don’t you pose a question for the class based on this week’s reading?”
He leaned forward, dropped his elbows to his knees, drew his feet back under the chair, and held his head for a moment before he looked up. He said, “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?”
By the end of the day, he was the most important boy in school. People lingered to watch him pass in the hallway and gave him plenty of space at his locker.
Mrs. Andrews added girls’ physical education to her teaching load, and from then on she seemed always to have a whistle around her neck. She moved with a new formality even when teaching history. While Stanley Peabody and Boly Cardwell headed a small group that gathered in the bleachers to run wind sprints, the drum major sat apart, focusing on Mrs. Andrews. On coed gym days, her husband, Bud Andrews, was also on the field, coaching the boys, a classic phys-ed instructor in sweats and a severe crew cut that bared the top of his scalp. One cold, dark afternoon when the windows of the gym were silver with reflected light and the air was sour with sweat, Coach Andrews suddenly sprang into the bleachers, lifted the drum major into the air, and shook him like a rag doll. The drum major managed to retain his smile, even as his head was flung about.
Coach Andrews was briefly suspended and the drum major was assigned a history tutor, though everyone agreed that Mrs. Andrews could hardly be blamed for her husband’s freak-out.
I spent my paper-route earnings on small things, an imitation Civil War — era forage cap, a British commando knife, steel taps for my shoes, muskrat traps; I had gotten caught by some magazine coupon swindle whereby I tried to win a baby monkey whose huge eyes dominated the advertisement, but when I fell behind in my payments and began to doubt if the monkey would ever be shipped, I switched schemes and wound up on an easier payment plan with a flying squirrel that bit me savagely and flew around our basement for two days before escaping through the window. My father said, “Next time you’ve got ten bucks to spare, don’t throw it away on a squirrel.” My luck changed when, digging up a jack-in-the-pulpit as a gift for my mother, I discovered an old brass compass, which I attributed to voyageurs, coureurs de bois, Jesuits, Récollets, and their various bands of Pottawatamies, Wyandottes, and Hurons. Few facts came my way that could not be magnified. That compass was always in my pocket, an obvious talisman, the one thing that stood between me and the dreaded unknown.