The drums tolled like the heartbeat of the earth. Left. Left. Left, right, left.
Up ahead, the Academy Band struck up “The Marines’ Hymn.”
Fall, a hot Friday afternoon, and the Brigade Dress Parade. In short blue high-collared padded jacket with gold buttons, black leather sword belt, high-waisted trousers, and white leggings, Dan marched at the head of the company. The dress sword, modeled on one presented to John Paul Jones, was welded to his right shoulder. His left hand, in a spotless white glove, swung six inches to the front, three to the rear. The other midshipmen officers kept perfect pace behind him.
Winston Door, the company commander, was sick in his room, down hard with flu. Can’t fuck up now, Lenson … To Dan’s left marched his roommate, Teddy Scherow, bearing the glittering guidon with the company number in gold on a blue field.
Stribling Walk. Above the marching columns resplendent with bright brass and glittering gold swayed the sparkling steel of bayonets. Polished boondockers swished through autumn leaves. Shouted commands drifted back from the lead companies. Dan centerlined on the starboard walkway, measuring his paces so the sandblowers—the short mids, at the rear of the company—wouldn’t have to run to keep up. They passed the Midshipmen’s Monument, dedicated to grads fallen in the Mexican War. Mahan Hall loomed ahead, towering above the hooknosed figurehead of HMS Macedonian, dismasted and captured by Stephen Decatur in the War of 1812.
Forget that. Concentrate. He eyed the turn point, counted the steps, and lifted his sword.
“Column lellft … harch.” He snapped the blade down and pivoted smartly off his right foot. The company followed, each rank pivoting in turn, then realigning in a subtle shifting shuffle as each individual dressed and covered. To present, once more, a compact, aligned body, ordered, disciplined, in perfect step.
He squinted against the sun, centerlining himself on the pavement. In step with the drumbeat, at the regulation thirty inches per stride. Coming up: a column right, past the Museum and Preble Hall and the Barbary Monument, oldest in the Yard, a gleaming marble wedding cake, its bronze inscriptions eroding to green stains.
Downhill now, trees rustling overhead, the smells of mown grass, the high skirl of trumpets, the swish and stamp of a thousand boots. Past the brick bulk of Isherwood Hall, named for the engineer who’d dragged the Navy kicking and screaming into the Age of Steam. Tourists and families lined the route, dressed as if for church, smiling and applauding.
The field opened ahead. Named for the Monitor’s captain, blinded in the battle with the rebel ironclad but still fighting, until the monster retreated to its lair. Dan resisted the urge to hurry, keeping his interval with the company ahead. Sweat soaked the rubber-padded wool of his tunic. The high collar chafed his neck and his heels burned, but he couldn’t do anything about that. Suck it up, Lenson, he told himself. Grit your teeth. The Brigade’s unofficial motto: a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of education, jammed up your ass a quarter at a time.
He glanced toward the river. A yawl was gliding past. His gaze yearned toward it. Was that a woman, on deck? A flash of tumbled locks, long, bare legs—
“Dan!” A warning from behind.
When he snapped his attention back, he realized he’d tuned out at exactly the wrong second. Delayed his column-left onto the field, placing them off track for their assigned position. Not just his company, but those following, as well. “Shit,” he muttered. Then, aloud, “Column lellft” … sword raised … Scherow lifted the guidon, passing the signal back … “Harch.”
The band swung into “Anchors Aweigh.” The steady multifarious tromp of boots behind and ahead dulls to a softer whoosh through the precisely mowed, meticulously fertilized grass. A milling haze rises. Shining motes dance in the sun, a golden mist that smells of haylofts and lawn mowings.
Dan nodded to Teddy, who peeled out and sprinted ahead, searching the turf for the bronze markers that spaced the companies across the field. Once some anonymous prankster had pried them up the night before. Battalions had wandered lost, formations countermarching into one another, disintegrating into chaos. Now the markers were screwed deep into the ground.
When Scherow halted fifty paces ahead, Dan grimaced. They were way off. He didn’t want to try a half-left. Everybody had a different idea of what forty-five degrees was. The grading officers were scrutinizing them from the stands, binoculars aimed like gunsights. He bit his lip and corrected left two yards.
A mutter from behind: “You’re not gonna make it drifting over.”
Out of the side of his mouth: “I’ll make it.” He corrected once more, hoping the file guides picked it up. Then again.
Not great, but better. They were still about five feet off though. Scherow glanced back and took one surreptitious step right. Watching from the side, the grader might not even notice.
“Company…” Left, right, left, right; command on the left foot, execute on the right. “Halt.”
The company stopped, swayed, steadied. He imagined it from above: again the subtle microadjustments, as each marcher gauged and corrected dress and cover, the recalibration eddying back through the ranks. He lifted his sword and drawl-shouted, “Orderrrr … harms!”
A thunderous thud, as the butts of a hundred rifles slammed into the sod. “Paraaade … rest.”
A clatter as his company snapped rifles outboard, left feet outward, left hands whipped up behind the back. Dan dropped his sword tip to the ground and took the same stance.
The band halted, all at once, mid-beat. From the reviewing party, a knot of men and women before the stands, an officer stepped to a mic. The PA system crackled. “Ladies and gentlemen,” it intoned, “the Brigade of Midshipmen.”
Applause clattered off the brick façades of Captain’s Row. Well, maybe it looked better from the stands. When you weren’t sweating in ranks, breathing hard, watching some kind of insects boiling up from the ground a few yards in front of you.
Ground wasps. Shit! They whirled in short arcs, executing, he guessed, some sort of search pattern. Looking for whatever had disturbed their afternoon. The breeze wafted them back toward him. He began to sweat in earnest.
“Ree … port.”
Far ahead, the High Stripers marched and countermarched. Swords flashed in the air. Hoarse shouts floated back.
Dan flexed his knees, eyeing the wasps. More were swarming up, milling, joining in an ominous high-pitched buzzing. A subterranean nest. Good thing the company hadn’t halted right on it. But the bastards were widening their search.…
A long pause. At last the order floated back, passed from the brigade commander to the regimental commanders, parroted by the battalion commanders. “Ah-ten . . hut … Pree-sent … harms.”
Sword up from the ground, hilt at the face, arm half turned, extended upward at a forty-five-degree angle. A muffled shriek sounded from someone in the company to their right as he, or she, got a bayonet tip in the back of the head.
The band struck up the National Anthem. Elevated, rigid, his sword arm trembled. He set his teeth as behind him the rest of the company, holding eleven pounds of rifle in front of their bodies, grunted and sighed.
The last note echoed away to silence. He bit his lip, willing his arm not to fall, not to shake. How much longer.…
“Order … arms.”
They stood for what seemed eons in the broiling sun as someone was awarded a medal. Not a mid, of course. The words defense and heroism. The rest was indecipherable. The wasps explored the air around him, then his face. He didn’t move. Then, gradually, they drew back, rehousing themselves in their hole.
Dan eyed it apprehensively. When the company marched off, they’d track directly over the nest. He couldn’t think of any way around it, though. Sidestepping would just slam his company into another.
Unfortunately, he had a youngster, a third class, who was allergic. Harrison had nearly died after a bee’s sting in Chapel. He was on medical hold. Dan gritted his teeth, trying to think of how to save the guy.
Then had it. Maybe. If the wind … yeah. It was cooling the back of his neck, coming off the river.
“Hey. Corwin.” He angled his chin just enough to mutter over his shoulder.
“Aye.” The laconic, redheaded violinist was the tallest in the company, so he was in the first rank.
“Got a wasp nest up here. Harrison’s gonna walk right over it.”
A pause. Then: “What you wanna do?”
“Swap him out with … whoever’s four places to his left.”
“You kidding? That’ll fuck up his whole rank.”
“He steps a half pace back. Scoots to the left. The other guy, half a pace forward, then he scoots right.”
“No way, José. The grader’ll roast us.”
“So Harrison gets stung? Just pass the word. But don’t execute until my command.”
Another pause; then, murmurs. He hoped the order didn’t get mixed up on the way back. Like a game of Telephone, passed from mouth to ear to mouth.
The high-pitched, carrying voice of the brigade commander. Then, louder, passed back battalion by battalion: “Pree-sent … harms!”
The slap and clatter of palms on the loose wooden handguards of the old Garands. “Stand by,” Dan said out of the side of his mouth.
A terrific bang went off somewhere behind them. The saluting battery, firing blank charges out over the Severn. As ever, someone in the stands screamed. Car alarms blared singy-songy along the seawall. The clap echoed away. Another bang. Another.
He called back over his shoulder, “Ready…”
White smoke drifted over the ranks, choking, sulfurous.
“Two,” Dan yelled as the smoke filtered over them, blurring the outlines of the companies to either side. Also obscuring, he hoped, the vision of the officers with binoculars and grading cards.
The smoke thinned, drifted past. He eyed the nest again. Yeah, they were still hunkered down there. Probably holding a staff meeting, deciding what to do.
Finally, the command every mid on the field had been thirsting for. “Pass … in … review.”
He lifted his sword. “Company. Forward … harch!”
With a thud and a jingle they surged into step. As he passed the hole he glanced down. The wasps were still milling down there, on edge, pissed off. They’d be out for blood at being marched over again. He just hoped nobody else was allergic … at least he’d gotten Harrison out of range.… He dismissed that and concentrated again on steering the company through the furrowed grass left like wakes in the green by the company ahead.
No howling behind him, no curses. Maybe they’d lucked out. The company could use a decent grade. Navy made a big deal about one big family, but everyone competed, every moment, from marching performance, to grades, to aptitude. Even if you avoided walking out Bilger’s Gate, your final class rank determined everything. Your choice of service. Your duty station. How fast you got promoted, out in the Fleet.
Where he’d start over, at the bottom again …
He wondered if everyone around him felt the same. Like some kind of imposter … just an actor, like in his roommate’s plays …
The reviewing stand loomed. Marines in green and black. Navy in blue and gold. Ranks of Old Grads in sport jackets and GO NAVY caps, wives and daughters in flowered dresses and straw sun hats, aiming cameras. He reeled his mind in and straightened his back.
And the band struck up “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the sunlight glittered off bayonets, and the same chill ran up his back he’d always gotten, ever since Plebe Summer.
Standing alone to the right of the line of march stood a slightly bent, gray-haired figure, with gold up to his elbows.
Dan lifted his sword. “Eyes … right!” and snapped his head around.
The Supe. His white-gloved fingers grazed a gold-encrusted cap in salute. For just a fraction of a second Dan caught a glance from under the visor, a blue-eyed, piercing perusal sharp as a stab from an épée.
Yeah. The old man had marched here, too, once, just like all the rest. And for one long second Dan wondered if it was even remotely possible that in some future alternate universe he, too, might stand there, like that.
Ha! He’d be lucky if he graduated at all.
The moment passed. He shouted, “Ready … front,” and snapped his head back. Then his boonies rang on asphalt again, on the road back to Mother B, and a hubbub broke out behind him, cursing, joking, the discipline and unanimity of the parade evaporating, the tight cohesive machine shattering again into its individual shards.
Becoming, once again, all too human.