The circular board rattles loudly as it is set on the table, a consequence of marbles rolling about within its metal innards. “I’ll take the white ones today,” Jack says. “You want green again?” “Why not?” Jack begins settling each of the colored marbles into their assigned dimples on opposing sides of the six-pointed star. “You ever going to tell me your name?” he says to the other man. “‘Gunny’ doesn’t work for you anymore?” “Just curious.” “Well, you can always call me what you’re supposed to.” “That being?” “Officer Grier.” “Gee, not ‘sir, Officer Grier, sir’?” “Nah! You’re a little long in the tooth for boot camp lingo.” “Now that—Paris Island, armpit of the world—that was one of the best times of my life.” “Bet you didn’t think so while it was going on.” “Oh, it definitely had its memorable moments,” Weiss says. “Whose turn is it to start?” “Mine. I won last time,” Jack says pushing a white marble from the bottom row out into the area all ten spheres will have to negotiate like a No Man’s Land before reaching the opponent’s starting point. Grier doubts Jack. In his very clear memory of their previous week’s games, he himself had lost the first one and won the second, which would make it his turn at first move. But he lets it slide. A small dose of dishonesty won’t kill him. People in Jack’s position aren’t known for scrupulous integrity. “One time, Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Marsden told me to get down and do pushups until he got tired,” Jack is saying. “What the hell did you do to warrant that?” “Reveille sounded and I didn’t roll out of the rack with my fingers lined up against the seams of my skivvies.” “Cardinal misdemeanor,” intones Grier. But he is thinking, ‘here it comes, all that brothers-in-arms stuff. Sometimes I think he’s trying to set me up for some kind of con. But what the hell, I like Corps tales. Just wish I knew which of his to believe.’ “Yeah. Only then, after I start doing them and counting out loud, he marches the rest of the series off to chow and forgets about me.” Jumping a green marble over another green marble and then over the one he’d moved out during his initial thrust, Grier is rumbling what might be a small laugh. He says, “No shit. He forgot you? There was actually a time when you weren’t obnoxiously obvious?” Jack grins. “I had my less distinct days. Long time ago. Hey, ‘obnoxiously obvious’? I like that.” “Most people would not consider it a compliment. So anyway, what happened?” “I did as ordered. At least as long as I could. Lost count somewhere around two hundred and just sort of collapsed. When they came back from breakfast I had to be put on a gurney and taken to a doctor at the Navy hospital in Beaufort. All the muscles in my arms and legs had locked up and wouldn’t straighten. They shot me full of muscle relaxants, one extremity at a time.” Grier longs to say, “In my Marine Corps, you would have been sent back to a motivational platoon, where they would use hard labor to work the goldbricking out of you. That would guarantee your not graduating with members of your own series. Unfortunately, those tough, attitude-adjustment platoons had been discontinued in 1975 due to political pressure, probably just before Weiss was recruited. But such a comment is not tolerable at this point. The Team—which means mostly Olmster, the man with his finger on the power button—is still trying to round up a paper trail of this guy’s life. There’s been a snag of some sort, almost as though Jack Weiss had no history earlier than ten years ago. When those early records surface, then Weiss can be challenged by the truth. For now, he will be allowed to talk any way he wants, to tell any stories he thinks will impress. Master Gunnery Sergeant Walter C. Grier retired with all the hash marks on his dress blues appropriate to thirty years in the Corps. At forty-eight, he had been too young and too active to settle into playing golf or to taking up garage woodworking. He was too old to use his military background as a doorway into municipal police agencies. Maggie, his wife of twenty-nine years, had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and he needed extra money, more than his pension provided, for the aggressive new therapies that were unavailable through VA hospitals. He trained as a penal officer in his home state of Indiana, then spent a year and a half at the Michigan City, Indiana Correctional Institute. Maggie’s cancer went into remission for a little over six months, then reappeared in a vicious new form. To secure further specialized treatment, they had moved to a suburb of Detroit. He became part of the Michigan corrections system. With her death four years earlier, he had considered returning to Indiana. But he was too shattered, too lethargic to bother making the move. Their dreams of taking to the road in an RV once she retired as a primary school teacher, now seemed sad, hollow as leaves swirling in a gusty twilight. He stayed where he was, marking time, going through the motions of a life he no longer recognized. Gilman Olmster had visited Michigan’s Ryan Correctional Facility and remembered his favorable impression of Grier during an earlier meeting at the Indiana prison. The retired military man was tough, could handle just about anything the convicts threw at him. Occasionally, when they were in a disorderly mood, that could include the prisoners’ own excretions. But Grier also had a particular astuteness. Combined with an underlying, but well-concealed compassion, and a genuine desire to see improvement in what was unarguably becoming an impossible situation in the penal systems of the world, he was a perfect candidate to work on Olmster’s project.
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