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By Root 506 0

’s bewilderment. It was wartime, and every ounce of metal was needed for tanks, guns and airplanes, which meant they couldn’t replace the clapper—good news for me, but a crisis for the staff, because the masters had always relied on the bell to order cadets to their classes and other events. Perplexed, they found a cadet who played the trumpet and ordered him to toot his horn every hour. But they couldn’t agree what he should play, so he had to keep trying different songs; he could have played “Annie Laurie” and it would have served the purpose, but they kept telling him to learn another new tune, and he was constantly missing notes, which was comical, and his poor playing almost hospitalized me with laughter. I’ll never forget that poor benighted cadet with his horn at his lips trying new bugle calls and constantly hitting wrong notes.

When they realized the clapper was gone, the faculty decided that a cadet must have been responsible for its disappearance, so they summoned all the cadets to a formation and ordered the culprit to identify himself. When no one came forward, the battalion was put “on bounds,” which meant we couldn’t go into town, normal privileges were suspended and we were confined to the study hall during our free time. The masters were sure that the offender would have bragged about his larceny, and that by punishing the entire battalion one of the other cadets would rat on him.

I promptly announced I was forming an ad hoc committee of cadets to conduct its own investigation of the crime, which I called a sacrilegious assault on one of the most hallowed traditions of Shattuck. Of course the staff loved me for this. Then I named all my enemies—cadets I didn’t like—as probable conspirators in the theft. Even today I find myself laughing at this elaborate hoax and the style with which I carried it off.

No one has ever discovered the truth. Eventually the faculty had to surrender; they restored our privileges and everything returned to normal. Meanwhile, I had looked like a knight, the one cadet at Shattuck who’d had the courage, honor and sense of its venerable traditions to demand that the perpetrator be held accountable for his deed. The secret of being a successful vandal in military school is not taking on a partner. If you are the only one who knows a secret, and you keep it and are deft and careful, you will never be apprehended.

7

AFTER TWO SEMESTERS at Shattuck, I went on the bum for a summer, riding the rails, living in hobo camps and hanging out with tramps. My traveling companions were drifters from all over America—professional full-time hoboes—and I learned that they had a social system of rules, customs and traditions as rigid and well defined as those of any culture I ever encountered later. The first thing I learned was never to ask a stranger about his previous life. Many were on the run from a wife, the police or a life they no longer wanted, and when you asked what they did, more often than not, they’d answer, “Just wasting time.” I learned their lingo, jargon and secret codes: a certain sign marked with chalk in an alley meant that a vicious dog lived nearby; a different symbol indicated that residents of the nearest house were generous. Around noon, everyone who lived in the camps had to contribute something to the mulligan stew. We returned to the camp with our respective contribution and dumped it into a common pot, then ate together—from a tin plate if we had one or right out of the pot if we didn’t. The camps were democratic, with a prescribed pecking order like most cultures: younger, greener hoboes like me were expected to pay a certain respect to those with more miles under their belt; often an unelected senior hobo was regarded as a kind of de facto headman who could arbitrate disputes, although it wasn’t unusual for disagreements to be settled with fists. A fire blazed in the camp all day, usually with a charred, steaming pot of coffee perched on a rusty steel grate. The hoboes simply dumped the coffee grounds straight into the pot. Everyone drank the coffee black