Regiment of Women (20 page)

“It's somewhat embarrassing. Imagine
me
giving orders.” Yet he already felt a sense of power from merely being in the position in which he could wonder at it.

Young Howie said: “Oh, you'll be marvelous!” And blond Gordie shrugged his big shoulders. “I know the boys would rather have you do it than that awful Sergeant Peters.”

“Will they?” asked Cornell, cocking his head. “Will they?”

A brunet on the way back from the lavatory stared at the hat, sniffed, and flipped his face in the other direction.

Jackie was sitting in a depressed attitude on the edge of his bunk. He coughed. “I think I'm coming down with something.”

Cornell said: “I'm supposed to report to Peters. The captain didn't spell out my duties.”

Gordie patted his shoulder in a sweet way. Jackie sneezed.

The sergeant's quarters were in a little private room at the end of the barracks. She had her own bathroom there, but was given occasionally to appearing in the men's lavatories, presumably on inspection. But of what? She had a randy eye.

Cornell knocked on her door and was answered by a coarse “Yeahhhh?” He gave his name. “Oh, come in!”

She lay in T-shirt and trousers on her bunk, reading a comic book and smoking a cigar the odor of which was so filthy that Cornell feared he might swoon. With his scented handkerchief he fanned a channel through the blue cloud.

“I've been sent here by the cap—” He coughed violently. “She appointed me—”

“B.L.,” said Peters, grinning. “On my recommendation.” She swung her stockinged feet to the floor, sucked a mouthful of smoke, and expelled it in a blast which mushroomed off the far wall, on which were scotch-taped several magazine photos of boys in frilly black underwear and garterbelted black hose.

Peters patted the cot alongside her thick thigh. “Take the weight off.” Cornell sat down near the end. He found her physically repellent, and he could use such air as entered the door, which he had left ajar.

“I picked you out, Alcorn. I like your style.” She put the slimy end of the cigar between her lips and spoke around it. “I don't mind your looks, either. Haw, haw!” She held up two fingers. “You and me have to work together.” She scissored the fingers to demonstrate. “These kids need a strong hand—me. And a velvet glove—you. This is the first time some of them have been away from a school dormitory, ya know? Now lemme tellya what I wancha to do: you'll be responsible for gettin 'em up in the morning. That's reveille—not the real reveille we got in the women's army, with the bugle and all, and falling out on some cold morning that freezes your ass. Lucky you were born with a dong, Alcorn!”

Peters guffawed again and moved herself nearer Cornell, near enough to reach his knee with her gross paw. Cornell adjusted his bonnet and moved subtly away.

“Then you march 'em two abreast, like you seen me do, to the mess hall for breakfast. Don't count cadence or anything. We used to try a real military march, but men can't keep in step worth a shit—we had everybody stumbling and tripping, so it's a just a nice, easy walk now. After breakfast you lead 'em right to the classes, the interpretive dancing, needlework, and so on—I'll give you the mimeo'd schedule, but in a day or two you'll have it in your head. Same thing, the rest of the day.”

Cornell was wondering what duties Peters reserved for herself: at this rate he seemed to be doing everything. Perhaps she sensed this: she moved closer to him and handled his knee again.

“I'll take over on collection days.”

“Collection?” He hadn't much more of the bunk to slide to.

“The semen, kiddo! That's why you're here, remember?” She leaned across and kicked the door shut with her left foot, which meant she was already on him. She clasped his neck, whipped the cigar from her yellow teeth, and pressed two tobacco-tarred lips upon his startled mouth. He went backwards and banged his bonneted head against the wall. His legs flew apart, and her hand shot under his buttocks, squeezing them painfully. She was of a formidable weight, the unresistant soggy kind. Nevertheless, with a sudden out-breath he threw her off, and onto the floor.

He was ready to regret that, when she came up grinning.

“Hard to get, huh? I like that, Alcorn. And I can wait. I'm going to plug you, kiddo. Never doubt that.” She breathed stertorously from exertion and lust.

Cornell stood up, adjusted his B.L. bonnet, and stepped daintily around the sergeant.

“I'm sure we'll work together very well,” he said softly, and left the room in a neat, precise stride, almost colliding with Farley, who was just outside the door.

Farley's eyes were not serene. Had he been spying? Cornell would have liked to slap his ratty little face. Instead, he smiled.

Farley glared at him, and then at the cloche.

“What an awful color,” he said. “Pee-yellow.”

Cornell put a finger to his own lips. “Shhh!” He pulled Farley a few feet into the main barracks room and whispered: “You'll get in trouble, dear, if she hears you. This is supposed to be an honor.”

“Well, I wouldn't want it,” Farley said spitefully. He looked as if he might cry at any moment.

Cornell linked arms with him. He was stronger than Farley, and forced him to walk along the aisle.

“Don't think I want it,” he said. “But I don't like to make waves.
They
can be terribly brutal, you know. And the rest of the boys are pretty pitiful, not like you and me, dear. We must do what we can for them.”

“Why?” Farley looked indignantly through the side of his dark hair.

“They're our fellow men.”

“Screw them,” said Farley. “No man has ever done anything for me.”

“How many
women
have?”

Farley's lower lip came out. They had reached his bed, and Cornell released him. Farley sat down on the cot and put his disconsolate face in his hands.

Cornell said: “Farley, I wish you'd be my friend.”

Farley looked up, his eyes disturbed by mixed emotions.

“Well,” said Cornell, “think about it, anyway.”

He turned and started across the aisle.

“Georgie,” said Farley. Cornell turned back. “I'm sorry I was bitchy. The hat is really very cute on you.” He colored and averted his face.

Cornell sighed inwardly. He wondered how often he would have to go through this sort of farce. Men!

He crossed the aisle. Jackie was sitting on his, Cornell's, cot: he didn't like that.

“How did it go?” asked Jackie.

“O.K.” He decided not to tell of his experience with Sergeant Peters. He wondered whether Peters would think he had. Some women liked to be known as Dona Juanas, on the theory that men, masochistic conformists, were more easily overwhelmed if psyched by a reputation. Peters was very likely just such a brute.

He kept his account to a mere statement of his duties.

“How are you going to wake up on time?” Jackie asked, leaning back on one hand, just as if it were his own bed.

Cornell frowned. “Jackie, would you mind—”

Jackie said: “I've got it!” He went to the wardrobe behind the beds, pulled aside the flowered curtain, and came out with a little yellow alarm clock, the face of which was a clown's; the hands were representations of a clown's gloved fingers, the index outthrust, and one arm shorter than the other. It was a child's timepiece. Jackie was so silly, but he really was goodhearted and impossible to hate.

All in all, Cornell had not made a bad beginning for his mission. He had made several friends. He had the confidence and approval of the authorities. He even had an official function. He felt sure he could continue successfully to resist Peters, and he suspected that the captain also had a gentlewomanly letch for him.

He was supposed to report once a week to the Movement, as well as at any time of emergency. Oddly enough, this was to be done by telephone. There was actually a phone line into the underground headquarters; not a properly sanctioned one, but a tap from the basement connection of offices in the building above, namely those of Huff House. The telephone service was normally so awful that this went unsuspected—as did everything else in the old subway tunnel, so far as he could tell, confirming the Movement theory that the tyranny of women was exceeded only by their inefficiency.

Cornell wondered privately why, then, men remained the underdogs. But he would no more ask that of Stanley or even Frankie than he would ask Sergeant Peters how she expected to conquer him physically when he was a head taller than she and in much better condition.

The next morning he was awakened by his own internal clock thirty minutes before Jackie's alarm was scheduled to sound. Instead of rolling over for another half hour's snooze, which he would certainly have done without the B.L. bonnet, Cornell got up, shaved face, chest, and armpits, and did his face. His eyes were simpler than in the old days: almost no shadow and softer with the liner, a style that seemed better to suit the new nose. He was coming to accept that revision, no longer pinching it gently in wonderment.

Jerry really was a remarkable surgeon, considering the crude conditions under which he performed—considering that he was a man. Cornell had once forgotten himself and said that to Frankie. He couldn't help it. He hadn't changed that much, if at all. Sometimes he just had to be realistic: there must be some reason why women ran the world, because
they did
. Not even the Brothers could deny that.

Frankie had grimaced and said: “Georgie, Georgie, you're just going to have to work harder on your values.” Then he went into the familiar historical theory by which the Movement sought to explain everything: that men had once had power but lost it through pity for women. Blah-blah, blah.

Cornell peered into the mirror. Was that a visible vein on his nose? No, merely a loose hair. A
hair?
He feverishly examined his scalp. It looked as if it were thinning, though not specifically; he couldn't find a particular area of loss, but the strands he took between thumb and forefinger felt strange, lacking in substance. He brushed and shaped his hair with his eyes shut part of the time. He didn't want to see if any more fell out.

At last he got hold of himself, returned to the dormitory and exchanged his nightie and robe for the green uniform and yellow hat, adjusting the latter in his compact mirror, pulling little curls out below his ears. Did the captain mean it when she said he had a sweet face? If so, how many more years would that last? You never think your own face is sweet, yet if someone else says it is, you can see what they mean.

Cornell gave himself one more sweet expression, closed the mirror, and strode along the aisle, crying: “All right, boys, you've had your beauty sleep. Rise and shine!”

The recumbent men began to stir and murmur. Cornell harried them amiably, with that little touch of mockery that boys expect from those in authority. Until she fired him, Ida had usually addressed him in that tone. He missed it in the humorless Movement.

“Come on, children. Time to play!” The men grumbled, and more than once Cornell had to pinch the toe of some persistent sleepyhead. Several of the boys had gone to bed in curlers, many in masks of face cream. Jackie of course had done the works: he had treated his hair with one of the many concoctions from his portable drugstore and had turbaned a towel over it. His face was concealed behind a hardened cover of greenish mud, through which his eyes peeped out defenselessly, without the false lashes.

Sergeant Peters stayed in her room and probably would sleep all morning while he performed her duties. After the boys were dressed and made up, the beds had to be put in shape. He knew that from the morning before, when Peters had marched up and down, commanding. Cornell did it more gently, though some of the men were awfully slovenly when it came to putting away their nightclothes. He had to admonish one big redhead whose shorty pajamas were left where the man had stepped out of them: on the bedside rug.

Finally the job was done, all the coverlets in place, all the wardrobe curtains drawn, and a detail of four boys had zipped around with dry mops and taken up the balled dust, loose hair, and chewing gum wrappers. Cornell then led his group to breakfast, where, supposing he should set an example, he performed a heroic feat with the mountain of scrambled eggs and accompanying logjam of sausages. He ate a good third of it To compensate he would try to skip lunch. He could not bring himself to chide the boys who picked at their meal. It was obscene to face that much food in the morning.

Peters had not yet furnished him with the mimeographed agenda, but yesterday they had returned to the barracks after breakfast. So they did it again today. He was wondering whether to wake up the sergeant when it came to his attention that he hadn't seen Farley since the night before. He now remembered that Farley's bed was already made when he was waking up the others. In the heat of his responsibility, he had not reacted seriously to that observation, and had assumed Farley was in the bathroom. He had not noticed him at breakfast.

Another thing Cornell did not possess was a roster against which he could check attendance. A man could desert without his being the wiser. Mary! Suppose Farley had run off. Could
he
be blamed? Cornell went through the lavatory, looking into the showers and each open toilet booth. The last one was closed. “Farley?” No answer. Suppose Farley had sat down on the toilet and slashed his wrists. Cornell's limbs turned numb. He rapped on the door. “Farley?”

It was Jackie's voice that wailed: “I'm not feeling well, Georgie!”

Cornell returned to the dormitory. Gordie sat writing a letter on flowered notepaper. He had one of those correspondence kits which when unfolded made a little lap desk.

“Have you seen Farley?”

“Who?”

“The brunet.” Cornell pointed at Farley's bed.