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  “I wasn’t staring.”

  “You certainly were staring. You could knock out the fuse with your eyes. Hey,” the Sergeant said, “you know why the Lieutenant’s so nervous up there?”

  “No.”

  “They’re all misplacing the fire. Your whole company. The whole lot of you scared stiff.”

  Stein, astonished, rolled the grenade absently with his fingers, hoping that the Sergeant did not notice. “I’m scared too,” he said.

  The Sergeant squatted gracelessly in the sand, leaned toward Stein and picked up the grenade delicately. “I’ve thrown a thousand of these things,” he said confidentially.

  “Yes?”

  “Got in the trenches on Midway once stuck with a load of them; needed to blast out Japs and threw them one after another. Exposed, opened the whole position,” the Sergeant said almost cheerfully, “and the Japs came down. Then one blew up on me; put me in the back lines for months. Know how many operations I took?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stein.

  “Had six for the damage that thing done. What do you think of that?”

  “I think they’re very dangerous,” Stein said, looking at the trees, at the line of smoke which drifted from the near horizon and hearing the bellowing of the megaphone Lieutenant, the cries of the men as the grenades hit, throwing fire against yards of sand. “I don’t like them.’”

  “You don’t like them,” said the Sergeant. “I’m scared sick of them.” He paused. “So don’t think that just because you all been lucky today those things ain’t murder. Jesus,” murmured the Sergeant, “I don’t know how they give people like you stuff like this. They’re combat. I wouldn’t touch them.”

  Stein said nothing, looked away from the Sergeant, clamped his hands. Over the man’s left shoulder he could see the dry grass and trees of the rear range; somewhere in the distance beyond that was the road over which the trucks and cars occasionally passed, the trucks filled with men like-embryos hunched over the rear panels, stripped to the waist and sobbing with exhaustion: KP details on the way to post. The cars, when’ they murmured by, were bright, insolently ornamented and fast; the post was on the outskirts of a college town and Stein could see the opaque faces of young men and girls, laughing as they looked upon the range. They were amused by the Army. In the far distance, Stein now imagined that he could hear this laughter, wavering under the horizon, against the organs of the field, from all the spaces where the cars were and where they had gone, and it covered. the range, assaulting him. Now, in a small pocket of time, as the Sergeant reached toward the grenade to tell him what to do, he saw an officer’s vehicle pass gracefully. On the rear parapet of the jeep was a young Captain in dress khakis looking at the range with binoculars moving them up and down in rapid, polished strokes. Stein restrained an idiotic impulse to brandish his grenade and wave. The officer leaned perilously and said something to his driver; the jeep began to pick up speed and in an instant it was moving very quickly, but the Captain still remained on his parapet, looking at the range. Stein, in his fatigue, imagined that he could see the eyes of the Captain through the binoculars, the clenching of his hands as he moved the instrument up and down and told his driver: Follow the road out of here; follow it fast.

  “Softball,” the Sergeant was saying, “you know softball?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mean rules; I mean how to throw a ball. Quick and sharp.”

  “I think I know that,” Stein said. On the parade ground before Reveille he had thrown stones in the darkness, practicing a windup that morning. The stones had clattered on ridges of the field and Stein had been unable to judge how he was throwing: can’t toss a grenade like that, he had muttered in the darkness, hearing the stones collide.

  “Then take this,” the Sergeant said with a sigh of disgust. He handed Stein his grenade; after the fingers of the Sergeant had touched it, it seemed to have an entirely different composition, be tilted at a different angle to his hand. From its surface seemed to come an odor of smoke. “Practice throws,” the Sergeant Said. He put his knees in the sand and looked up at Stein, his eyes hollow and vaguely pleading.

  Stein lifted the grenade and jerked his arm listlessly several times, looking away from the Sergeant. When he turned back, the eyes of the Sergeant had become absolutely blank and the man leaned forward and put Stein’s index finger on another surface, sullenly moved his arm for him while Stein shuddered at the horrid rasp of skin. “All right,” the Sergeant said, panting, looking down the line at the cubicles and the invisible troops crouched howling inside. “I got my insurance. You might as well kill us now as later.” Glancing at the walls of the cubicle, the Sergeant said, “Go on. And when you throw it, throw it! I don’t want my wife getting that damned insurance; not until I finish this enlistment, at least, and get into her a few more times.” Unreasonably, the Sergeant giggled. “I got two years left on this hitch,” he said, “then I re-up again. You want me to throw that thing? I don’t care. It don’t mean nothing to me. Don’t tense up when you throw it. Stay calm. You know what it was like after Midway, lying all taped up in the hospital? No one came in to see me for a month, and then it was an re-enlistment officer. You going to throw that grenade? Listen, if you don’t, I will and — ”

  “No!” Stein said, his voice sounding peculiarly unresonant and distant in his ears, the voice of a departed man, someone, perhaps, of whom he had once read seated in a comfortable chair: poor son of a bitch. “I want to throw that grenade. I have to!”

  “Then throw it,” said the Sergeant, his eyes blinking. He crouched again to his haunches, blew on his hand, looked dully at Stein. “Bum down the blasted range, college boy.”

  Stein, hearing this, brought the grenade into the air and lofted it, feeling as if his arm were essentially detached; feeling that only his arm had anything at all to do with this, he brought the grenade back slowly. It was too slow to gather momentum and the Sergeant shouted something but Stein, by then, at the top of his swing, with a graceless gesture of two fingers, had disengaged the pin. It fell noiselessly in a small arc into the sand and as Stein saw this in the comer of his vision, he felt an instant of pure freedom, an infinite stroke of time in which he existed alone with the grenade, the range somewhere far below where it rattled to the frantic voice of the Sergeant. He felt the instrument bounce against his palm, looked far down at the row of trees where it was going surely to be placed. Then, at last, he heard the Sergeant screaming at him to throw the grenade, and Stein thought, he’s really scared. Then the grenade fell from his hand. It cleaved like a knife through the damp surface of his palm and fell. Stein looked at it with disinterest. It had been a silly thing to happen. The grenade lay half-toppled beneath; it seemed impossible that it was going

  to go off. It looked like an artifact. Stein reached with a foot to turn it over for examination.

  The Sergeant screamed suddenly and dived on top of him, slapped him sharply in the temple and Stein fell with a gasp away from the grenade, to the other side of the pit. The Sergeant was on top of him, holding him desperately by the shoulders and burying his face in the sand; Stein choked and realized that the Sergeant was putting him in deeper and deeper. Stein had the sudden impression that he was far below all sense of action; sand was in his nostrils and ears and all he heard was a thick, whirring absence of sound. He stretched an arm forward to pull some grains from his ear. Then, with a series of maddened and ferocious explosions, the grenade erupted. There were successions of high, white, furious flashes, and atop him, the Sergeant muttered and bucked as if he were about to enter the sand. Stein, pulling free of the trap then with a groan amidst the fragmentation, wondering, saw this. The men down the line were running at him. Some of them were crying.

  III

  In the induction station two months before that, it had been like this: the man sitting next to Stein was almost thirty and his features were already lit with certain intimations of a waiting and unique disaster. The two of them had sa
t rigidly against one another there in the empty room for some time, all alone on the bench, far back from the Recruiting Sergeant and his telephone, and finally the man had said, not looking at him but staring out the window at the feet of many people lurching on to their meals, “What they get you for?”

  “I don’t know,” Stein said quietly, “I don’t really know.” Did anyone know? he thought, looking at the precise frieze in front of him. You vanished into a series of situations; out of them another individual came to a pass that looked final but was, of course, only another prologue. It was all too abstract. “It wasn’t something I could get away from,” he said. “I mean to say, I had no dodges.”

  The man looked as if he were about to spit at him but then he considered the Sergeant ahead carefully, as if he were measuring him for some gloomy meeting. The Sergeant was talking into his phone, looking in their direction every now and then with a vaguely reminiscent stare; it appeared that he had momentarily forgotten their business but would surely, in just an instant, remember, and to their regret.

  “Let me tell you what I’m in for,” the man said, “I’m in because of some very strong suicidal tendencies.” He folded his hands and thought for a moment, apparently satisfied with what he had said. “Because that’s always been the pattern,” he added, “that and the stupidity. I never was too bright, being blocked by neurotic tendencies. And I didn’t save myself when I could have; They got me for two years now.”

  Stein said nothing, grimacing, turning to look out the window. He thought he could see a crowd of girls, bright dresses shimmering in the heat, hurrying to lunch, shouting at one another and he felt a wave of exhausted lust; their circumstances, after all, were not nearly so different from his own.

  “They’re trapped, too,” he said to the man. It was a new insight. “You’re damn right. The General on the phone there is worse in it than we are. But he likes ‘it.”

  “I mean the girls.”

  The man looked at the floor delicately, rubbed his shoetip. “What girls?”

  “The girls outside. They’re in offices; we’re in the Army. It’s the same thing.”

  “Oh, is it really?” the man said quietly, moving away from Stein a trifle. “It’s exactly the same thing, of course. I’m too neurotic to have thought about it until you caught it for me, of course.”

  But Stein felt an explosive restlessness within; it was something new, he had definitely seen something he had not seen previously. If he sat in one enclosure outside his chosen possibilities, surely all of the girls swiveled their way through a series of others and, if that were the case, was not communion possible? He had never before considered women in that way. There had always been a high elevation, a great distance and purpose in their circumstances; nothing simple. Now, he was not so sure. Why, that’s the trouble, he thought with excitement, that’s the whole trouble! It’s simple! “I never saw before,” he said.

  “Well, reach down and feel.”

  “It’s all the same,” Stein said with astonishment. “It’s all the same.”

  “That’s what I said the day I went for my physical. But it isn’t. What are you talking about, anyway?”

  “Forget it,” Stein mumbled, embarrassed. But his vision was clearer. In his hand was a duffel bag with his induction papers; he was waiting for a Corporal to come and lead them to the ceremony, close the shutters and be done with it. He had put himself there and yet it was not too late. It might be a court-martial offense to leave, to tell the Sergeant at the desk that he had reconsidered the matter and wished to postpone induction. But then again, there might be crevices of mercy in the institution that he had not fathomed; surely the Sergeant might see what had happened. They could go out into the corridor and discuss it like gentlemen, the Sergeant and Stein, and then the Sergeant would come back and destroy Stein’s folder, send him back to the girl-strewn streets with a favoring sigh. You beat the game. But then again, possibly and more likely, the as-to-the-moment friendly Sergeant might lean back in his chair, regard him with malicious glee and order his arrest. We got you. It could easily go that way. Stein got to his feet and put the duffel bag on the bench, brushing it against the man’s hip. “I’ve got to talk to him about something,” he said.

  “You’re not quite steady, are you?”

  Stein went to the desk and waited for the Sergeant to put the telephone down while he looked through the window, looking for the legs of the girls. From this new angle in the center of the room, Stein could see only the sky, a blank wedge which covered the entire window. Momentarily, he shuddered. “What is it?” the Sergeant said absently, still on the phone.

  “I want to talk to you about something.”

  “Looking forward to the South, huh?”

  “Look,” Stein said urgently, “I haven’t been sworn in yet.”

  “You have to understand,” the Sergeant said into the phone, “that there’s only so much meat we can ship. If I tell you two, it’s two. What do you want to do-replace the whole Fifth Army?”

  “In the first place,” Stein said, “I’m a voluntary induction.”

  “And if I tell you two, you’ll like it,” the Sergeant whispered into the telephone. “Some times are good; some aren’t so good. You’ll make do with what I send you!” He paused for a moment, looked over Stein’s shoulder to the man sitting on the bench. “Anyway, one of them’s experienced. He was in Korea.”

  “I want to hold back my draft,” said Stein.

  “Wait a minute,” the Sergeant said to the telephone. He turned to Stein. “Son, when you’re in, you’re in,” he said. “That’s the way it is. Now sit down and wait.”

  Stein looked into the clear eyes of the Sergeant and said, “Do I have to?”

  “Yes,” said the Sergeant. “Yes?” he said into the phone. “Yeah, it was tough luck for that one all right, no doubt about it.”

  Stein returned to the bench and moved somewhat closer to the man. “You were in Korea?” he asked.

  “Yes indeed,” the man said. His voice now was at an absolute variance with the sense of his words; it was as if an insistent child had crept within his glazed skin and was engaging in an intense series of disturbed motions. “Couldn’t get enough of it. Missed the Army the whole ten years I was out. Now I’m going to be happy again.”

  “I just tried to get out of here,” Stein said pointlessly.

  The man giggled. “Well, here you are,” he said.

  “What can I say? I had a bad basis for coming in myself. You know, those office girls outside — ”

  “Might lay you,” the man said shockingly, “and you just found that out after you walked in here. Well, that’s too bad, son; that’s really too bad.”

  “No, it isn’t that,” Stein said, looking at the scarred benches, the chipped walls, the dents in the floor; signs, he imagined, of a generation of men who had. passed through this room as now he was, deep in their own false visions and dreams. “I didn’t mean that at all,” and he saw the wall on his right where someone had scrawled in what looked like charcoal: You’re screwed when you were born, private. It seemed to be recent work. “It was something else.”

  “Something else,” the man said. He paused and seemed about to say something else but then he said nothing at all, following Stein’s glance to the message on the wall. When he saw it, he began to shudder. The two of them looked at it together for a long time and then the man began to nod vigorously as he rubbed and rubbed his hand. “You ain’t kidding,” he mumbled, “you ain’t kidding. And all of us are privates. All of us. All of us. All of us.”

  IV

  In the enclosure, then, it must have been this way. He had paused at the top of his swing looking far up and down the line, sensing on some low plane of perception that all of them-the men, the Lieutenants, the quivering Sergeant himself-were enjoying this. Now the grenades were roaring continuously; there was no pause in the thunder and Stein could see that there was a kind of structured destruction in the air; it was controlled
; it was under a strong hold, but it was there. Near one of the scarred trees, a small fire was bitterly resisting the flailing and curses of two Corporals who had backed to a safer distance. Every time a particularly loud grenade erupted, the Corporals would nudge one another. Yes, Stein thought, heaving the grenade above his head, they were enjoying this too: the death was there, but also the promise, and some of it was beautiful. At the top of his swing he froze. It was as if he had become aware, after a very long and difficult time, that he had always been listening for a particular sound which was now about to be heard. He knew that this was to be the instant of its coming’ but that he had to maintain absolute control to hear that sound. Stein did not know what it was; it was something far beyond the roar of the grenades and the yammering of the megaphone; it seemed to be in the form of a cry or whisper relating profoundly to his history, and he knew that if he held his position and waited, he would hear it. But this grenade could not be thrown for, if it was, the sound, when it came, would blend at once into the roar and would be gone, and with its unheard echo the most essential because undiscovered part of himself. Stein disengaged the pin, squeezed his grenade and waited. In just an instant it would be finished. The Sergeant screamed. But Stein did not hear him, did not hear the Corporals or· the megaphone, heard nothing; waiting in a frozen posture for that first music which would redeem him and bring him again to the surface of his unknown possibilities, an entire man. Fragmentation began.

  V

  “Now,” said the woman named Silver, “now, I am going to tell you something.”

  Across from Stein, a giant print clung damply to one of the walls — a horse and rider caught in an iron frieze, the animal about to throw the bearded man brutally into the mud but being restrained by a sharp spike on the man’s left boot. Paralyzed by rage and pain, the horse appeared to be dribbling saliva; the man held one arm above his head in defiance and triumph. They shouldn’t have such things, Stein thought tiredly, listening to the cadences of the woman’s voice, they should not have this contradictory tableau poised over violence and torture; it can excite people. Where do they get such things? It was obvious that either horse or rider would be dead by nightfall. A drab sun was ·painted near the horizon; it was close to dusk, and the stables were near. Harshly, he withdrew from the print and turned to the woman sitting next to him on the couch; her legs were posed as if for scuttling flight but studded with painful scars and veins, her hands folded babylike into a large yellow pillow, her face bright with clear sorrow, and listened to her voice, hearing only that sound in an immense, empty sadness. When it was time, he said, ‘What can you tell me, Mrs. Silver. What can you tell me?”