Honor and Duty by Gus Lee

Author:Gus Lee [Lee, Gus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5170-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

23

PEARL

New York, October 1966

I had three life goals: to study solids; to give up on Christine, who was dating others; and to bench-press three hundred pounds.

“What’s your max?” asked Duke Troth.

The last time I had spoken to him, at Smits’s BOQ six months ago, I had considered killing him. “Two-eighty-five,” I said.

“Put up two-ninety. I’ll spot,” he said.

We loaded the forty-fives, twenty-fives, fives, and two-and-a-half plates. I lay flat, loading up on oxygen. I had already worked out. I wondered if he’d drop the bar on me.

I lifted and lowered it slowly so it would not bounce, and pressed upward. My shoulders complained under the load as I kept my back flat. The plates rattled against the collars as my arms shook. The first four inches above the chest represented the most difficult lift zone, and I cleared it, my face feeling red. Just before I straightened my arms, everything I had in my arms quit, and I could go no further. Duke helped me finish the press.

“Umph,” I gasped, “thanks for the spot.”

“Didn’t lift an ounce.”

“Bull,” I breathed, “I was stuck.”

“Anyone asks me, you benched two-ninety clean.”

I stood up. “Hope no one asks you.”

“You’re not one of them Honor freaks, are you?” he asked.

I breathed deeply. “What brings you to Iron City?”

“Want you to join our study group,” he said.

“English? Social sciences? Psych? Tactics?”

“Juice,” he said.

I chuckled. “Duke, goats are supposed to study with hives, not other goats. What good could I do you in Juice?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a way to schmooz. You’ve dropped outa the Society.” His ice-cold eyes looked perfectly sincere. I studied his strong, hard, adult face. My own face was hardening with time. I picked up the eighty-pound bell and did tricep presses.

“Can’t figure you,” I gasped. “Being in a goats’ Juice group’d be like eating crepes at a dump.” I thought of that April night, when Schwarzhedd appeared and Smits and Troth announced themselves as bigots. “Which, on occasion,” I said, “I have done with you.”

“Tonight, fourth-floor reading room, after call to quarters,” he said. “Good group. Sonny Rappa’s our smart man.”

I had trouble imagining them together. I didn’t like it. He was forming a team. “Thanks, but I don’t study Juice that much.”

Juice depended on integral and differential calculus, whose intricacies I had barely learned and instantly forgotten in the previous academic years. Calculus employed sentences without English. It was a dark art, described in graphs rampant with round and sharp-edge squiggles, ancient totems of thunder dragons and small symbols of Egyptian hieroglyphs, black lines which took erratic perpendicular turns, boxes within rectangles filled with vicious glyphs, nonsensical gates, and legends with arrows which pointed to incomprehension. So much for studying more.

That left Christine. I had seen her for Christmas and summer leave. Her opposition to the military, and my commitment to it, had hardened like an old and treasured wound equal to the scarring of her physical rejection of me. I still loved her, devastated by the pain of being separated.

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