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Mary and James Hanna are writers who live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mary C. Hanna
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James E. Hanna
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The Wall
You were large-boned, ruddy-faced, blond -- blondest of the cadets, perhaps because you brush-cut your hair, squaring it on top so that it barely hid the baby pinkness of your scalp. You were blue-eyed, hawkish, almost striking at a glance, but your nose was too blunt for handsomeness and your jaw, thick and square, afforded your face an exaggerated symmetry. Even your chin was symmetrical -- a pussy chin we called it; it was deeply cleft, vaguely suggestive, and somehow a complement to the prominent ridges of your knuckles. Your hands, big and chapped, were a laborer's hands, competent only when polishing brass or performing the ritual manuals of rifle and blade. Your rifle, at these times, would pause in midflight, cracking your palm before whirling like a baton twice windmilled in the gleaming black mirrors of your shoes. And your sword, won only halfway through your second year, would leap with a life independent of your fingers, a slicing streak that hummed like a bullet in flight yet somehow captured fleetingly the shimmer of the sun.
That second and final year, when we roomed together, I was slow to ease the too persistent rumors that you waxed the soles of your shoes, slept at attention, and stuffed the rosary into your bore. We did laugh at you frequently, but not in the manner in which we laughed at witless Wippleman, legs apart on his bed as he farted flame over a silver lighter, or at fat pimply Hopper who howled like a puppy whenever we pink-bellied him after taps with drumming palms and stinging cans of deodorant. The chuckles were tighter when you were the target and the nicknames were mirthless, waspish -- lingering jibes like Super Mick, Burr Head, Mickey Military. Still, I felt little guilt when I failed to defend you; it seemed that your flat ears were not attuned to very many of our comments. You were your own clown, after all, and not ours.
Were you too estimable for a clown? -- for I did admire you occasionally, even when you stayed up till one in the morning making guilty my sleep while you fussed over your sword in preparation for the Saturday parade inspection. You even cleaned my rifle when there was time. You were convinced I could one day pass a Saturday inspection, though I never passed a Saturday inspection in my entire two years at Washburn. You were my platoon sergeant that second year, and it could only have cost you points when I accumulated the inevitable company demerits. Even so, you were the first to laugh whenever I lost step with the rest of the platoon or found myself marching alone after a sudden flank movement. Was it your poverty of reserve that was so disaffecting? I was not at all impressed by you the first day we met -- when you approached me in the mess hall, asked me if I would be on the wrestling team. Your gaze was too candid, your forehead too balding, and a hint of stutter hung trippingly on your tongue. You were so without mystery I could see there would be no getting to know you. This happened too quickly, in almost an instant -- the first bland moment of meeting you and perhaps the only one. Because in the months that followed, even the years, my impression of you changed hardly at all. As it turned out, you were not even much of a wrestler, unsurprising since the sport does require a modicum of guile. And clearly you were no opportunist; you were better inclined towards secondary spoils -- the tiresome gratuities of a lackey.
For this I always despised you a little myself.