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"You pull the pin and wrap some electrical tape around the handle of a grenade. Gasoline dissolves the sticky. The more loops, the longer it takes. Then it blows".
Valentine glanced back at Kugel, who passed out another test and winked. Ten days ago, Kugel would have had him and Tuber jogging around the fence perimeter holding hands for talking among themselves.
* * *
The ordnance-disposal training was the worst. They used real shells and demolition charges, with just enough dynamite hidden inside to knock you on your ass with your ears ringing. Worse, you had to work through thick gloves and plastic safety goggles that were more scratch than lens.
Tuber was clumsy, and set off a shell as he and Valentine worked. Valentine expelled a deep breath as he picked himself up, but Tuber went berserk.
"Goddamn goddamn goddamn!" he screamed, spinning, throwing off his gloves, goggles, and helmet like a whirligig expelling sparks.
"You're dead, dummies", Corporal Pope, the bomb expert at the training center, shouted, not that every man in the platoon didn't know.
Tuber charged the corporal. Half the men in the platoon, including Valentine, threw themselves at him. He tossed two men off one arm, sent another reeling with a blow, tossed a fourth through the window.
"Chill, man", Joho squeaked, Tuber's hand gripping at his throat.
Corporal Pope reached for his pistol.
"What the hell's going on in here?" Kugel yelled, poking his head in the door. "Pope, stand down".
Tuber charged at Kugel, hauling Valentine along like a backpack. Valentine couldn't say what happened next, only that he and Tuber went over like a tripped horse, knocking aside tables and classroom stools. He turned and saw Kugel with a club across the back of Tuber's neck.
"PeaBees, hold this cocksucker down!" Kugel grunted. "Pope, get your foot on his neck. Don't let him get leverage!"
Valentine threw himself across the small of Tuber's back. With two men on each limb and Pope bearing down on Tuber's neck, they just managed to keep him facedown on the floor.
Kugel hurried to the classroom slop sink and ran a pitcher of water. He returned and upended it on Tuber's head.
"Tubelow! Tubelow!" Kugel shouted. "Stand down!" Tuber continued to struggle and Kugel took out his pistol.
"No! He's giving", Valentine said, which wasn't quite true, but Valentine straddled the small of Tuber's back, putting himself between Kugel's pistol and the back of Tuber's head for a few seconds. Valentine reached up and caressed Tuber's cheek. "Take it easy, Tube. Take it easy. Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout...".
Tuber relaxed.
"Fuckin' Bears", Pope said.
They chained Tuber in his bunk for the rest of the afternoon, just in case.
* * *
Graduation came, and they were pared down to 105. The 14 rejects, the perpetual screwups who were the kind that got other men killed, were taken away in a barred bus. Some said they were the smart ones; they'd spend the rest of their sentence in a mine or lumber camp. Others said they were being taken off to be quietly hung somewhere. The
rest got tiny tattoos on their right biceps, done quick and dirty by the corporals, a little Roman numeral V and 775 beneath.
"You're PeaBees now", Kugel said, addressing them from the front of the church as they sat in the pews. They'd spent the morning cleaning the barrack, hanging up and cleaning the bedding, making everything spotless for the next "class".
"You're moving up to the front. The rest of your training will be in a school that'll make this look like kindergarten, the kind of school where mistakes make you dead. Ready to go make yourselves useful for a change?"
"Yes, Sergeant".
"Seven Seventy-five Company, you're finished here. Go and do right for a change, and maybe someday I'll see you back here".
He rolled up his sleeve and showed a fading blue tattoo: V with some blurry numbers beneath.
* * *
More buses came, the same seatless wonders in which the 775 Company rode, hanging on to bars fixed to the roof for dear life, swaying like a single mass in the turns. They were dumped in yet another depot, with the mountains ending to the west and Seattle's tower-dominated horizon blue in the distance. They ate militia sandwiches in an old IHOP. The men looked at the militia women with more hunger than they did their food.
