Chapter 4

Late in the afternoon, a younger Noble lay in bed, taking a short nap after school. A shaft of bright sunlight stretched across his body, and he slept in is perspiration uneasily, his subterranean dreams at the tip of waking. He felt several nudges on the arm, and in response he simply rolled to his side and resumed his slumber. But the nudges wouldn’t leave him, and he awoke with his mother by his side, her gaze suggesting a deep frustration.

“Where’s your report card?” she asked while nudging him.

“Lemme sleep,” said Noble.

“Where is it? You’re hiding it from me.”

“It’s in the knapsack.”

She rummaged through it to find a yellow slip of paper buried beneath graded homework assignments. She fished it out and dangled it above him.

“So let’s go down the list of subjects one by one, shall we?” she said, Noble knowing full well that his poor grades would only upset her. “Okay, English. C-. Mathematics. D. Spanish. D. Science. D-. Gym. Incomplete. Home economics. C. And band- my Noble with all that music you listen to, why am I not surprised? An incomplete in band. I’ve had about enough of this. Are you listening?” as she nudged him again. “I’m sick and tired of your grades, and don’t think for a second that I’m signing this. I want a meeting with your advisor right away. Get up. Get up,” with more nudges, and Noble stumbled to the bathroom and washed his face, while his mother called the school in search of Mrs. Cuthbert, his advisor for what seemed like centuries of his inability to learn, his grades in the same substrata since elementary school.

Add to this his total apathy towards school work. He audited these classes like a lost spirit drifting from room to room, staring at a branch which shook in the breeze, daydreaming about achieving a status of manhood unachievable, and thus settling for a status he could achieve by default: the daydreamer, looking at the girl at the desk by the door and asking her to the movies, his arm wrapped around her during a suspenseful scene.

His teachers never flunked him, nor did they pay much attention to him. He was no more than a clump of matter like the green tile of the classroom, traces of algebra on the blackboard, the heavy oak desk where the teacher sat, and his immaculate attendance record which provided them with the inkling that he was at least trying.

The subjects failed to interest him, but the concept and functioning of the school itself kept him occupied through the boredom of mandatory classes, as though these classes were thrown into the mix as events of secondary importance, the priority being the co-mingling of guys and girls during noisy study halls, lunch breaks, and after school programs, and perhaps the passing of notes beneath obscene desk-tops. He never gossiped much with his few friends but concerned himself with the gossip of others, as though he were some distant observer collecting information never to be used, only stored within vaults like looted relics. It’s one thing to specialize in observation, but it’s quite another thing to observe mindlessly without the acumen of judgment or the unpopular conscience of a referee. He was an observer by nature but did so to avoid interaction. He didn’t remain within any one social circle. Instead he kept to himself while belonging, in his mind, to each one of them. He was liked by all, but known by none, with the exception of Shylock Winston who at that time played football.

Their childhood friendship survived the diaspora of higher learning. During football season Noble rarely saw Shylock, as he was clearing the hallways with his fellow teammates, a right tackle and a defensive end, and maybe once in a while offering a brief check-up to see how Noble faired without him. It was in this autumn of loneliness that his mother confronted him with this report card.

“Is there something going on at school I should know about?” she continued, “or better yet, what the hell is not going on? Well, that’s obvious. It’s obvious that you don’t give a damn about your future, and I can’t see my son, my only son, throwing his future away. It would be one thing to try and then fail, but not to try at all...”

He responded to his mother’s questions by not answering them. He waited for the end of her soliloquy and then promised to do better. Her threats of visiting Mrs. Cuthbert were usually mollified by his promises to do better. She would always leave him with an ultimatum, only to be forgotten until the next report card.

It was during this time that Noble drifted apart from anyone with a pulse or fondness for him. His mother’s exhortations became empty words after a while, only to be repeated in similar verse later. But there must have been a reason for this drift, as though he had developed normally but gradually broke from everyone around him. Perhaps his own pattern of reasoning dumped him into a growing isolation: the ability to break two into one plus one, but the inability to understand how one plus one could equal two. On a more tangible level, his father’s beatings didn’t help matters. McCoy McCloud would beat Noble every once in a while for leaving a dinner plate unwashed, but his wife almost every night for reasons unknown. Noble’s dominant reaction was to wait in his room until the noises had stopped and then emerge in the darkness of the household, his mother weeping silently on the couch, her cheek with yet another welt served like a dinner special.

Most people would react fiercely to these occurrences, but Noble buried them like the nurse who treats the wounded soldier. He crushed ice into paper towels and applied it to the swelling. Most people would fight, but Noble was ambivalent, and as a result knew himself a coward. His soft walk in the school building never carried a big stick, and he noticed how the women in the hallways suspected him of this cowardice. Shyness can sometimes be perceived as arrogance, but the women saw little evidence of arrogance. After all, he dressed poorly, almost awkwardly, and the climate of social interaction was such that the women sensed his weaknesses more than the men, who attributed this shyness to a worthy innocence.

He won many acquaintances, especially from Shylock Winston, who, although the same age, knew him affectionately as a younger brother. But it was the idea of cowardice which accounted for this drift, and at certain points he contemplated military service, not as a brief thought, but as a long, drawn-out fantasy. The fantasy survived long and far enough to rest ultimately upon basic training: a maddening physical exertion where a boy is dismantled and rebuilt into a man who sleeps with his rifle, and as soon as he saw grueling work involved, he abandoned these intimations but not the awareness of his cowardice. It goaded him to the point of visiting a recruitment facility in Hackensack just to see what military service was all about. He believed the service could cure him, and it was this cowardice which the lieutenant noticed immediately.

“The Air Force is not for everyone,” said the lieutenant in a monotonous hum. “It’s six weeks of basic training, and I understand your fears about Boot Camp. We all had them, and soon each officer got over it. The military life, however, is not to be matched. Not only would you be serving your country- actually it’s the most patriotic maneuver you can ever make- but Air Force will teach you more about yourself than what the rest of society teaches. We help our own. We give you the tools to conquer these deep fears inside you. Basic training is just the beginning of a career in the state-of-the-art technology for our war planes. If you’ve got fears, then we help you deal with them, there’s no question about it. Our soldiers come in boys and go out men. That’s the bottom line. Courage is our creed.”

He left the cramped office with a promise to call the lieutenant later, but he never called. He was locked into indecision until the matter evaporated, and in the days to come while walking along the Waspachick strip, he asked himself: “What the hell was I thinking?” and abandoned any more of his so-called crazy ideas. And every once in a while he would return to this terrible awareness, as though cowardice was the worst insult to his manhood, and knowing it the fatal injury. And thus the coward takes the rashest route, but not until he has exhausted every avenue of assimilation with the men he sees at the morning train station, dressed in two-piece suits and reading the newspapers. The coward knows everyone around him has achieved a plateau of bravery, whether in deed or thought, which he cannot himself obtain, and thus to each man who possesses any assertiveness whatsoever he obsequiously bows and offers his servitude, his cowardice providing its own form of slavery, (the only escape a terrible yet blissful isolation away from men of achievement and command, which meant everyone), and if he were to estimate where these men of command and achievement gathered, he believed them to be found in the military. Noble thought it a crazy idea, but one which popped into his mind every so often.

His grades told an horrendous tale. Noble could not muster more than a D average, and in that autumn morning his mother called him on the bet that he would continue to do poorly in school. She arranged a meeting with Mrs. Cuthbert. Noble was surprised by the move but thought it nothing but a token gesture. After it was over, they would all forget the meeting and resume the dalliance of their lives. Or so he thought.

They sat in Mrs. Cuthbert’s office on a rainy afternoon. They were silent before she darted in with a manila folder under her arm, hurriedness sitting on her thin smile.

“Hi, I’m sorry, if I’m a little late, Mrs. McClellon.”

“But we’re the McCloud’s,” said his mother pointedly.

“The McCloud’s?”

“Yes, we have an appointment for this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes, and you are here, I see, of course, and your son is in the eleventh grade?”

“Tenth grade.”