One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  As I entered, I nearly stumbled over someone crawling toward the urinals. He had that odor and slept-in look which I assumed to be Town. In spite of the dirt, the stubble and the glasses, he appeared to be a clean-featured young man of perhaps twenty or twenty-one, handsome in a tall, muscular manner, but his unkempt face hung like a bad smell over his dirty clothes. I offered to help however I could. He stared at me for a moment as if he knew who I was, then looked very bored with me.

  “I’m Marduke the Mandrill and I play the mandolin with my mandible, baby, and I’m all right,” he said, holding up his right hand to show me the bloody, swollen knuckles. His voice, like his face, did not fit: his words were carefully enunciated, formed like bricks to be used in the construction of a Tower of Philosophy, absolutely undeniable. “Except for my left mandible, man,” he continued, examining the right hand under a pursed mouth, “I seem to be limping on it. I’m a cripple, you know, a fucking cripple, and there is no home in the American Army for a cripple crutch or a cripple creek or any other kind of deformity. Sorry about that, man. Suppose I’ll just be limping on home now,” he finished, crawling under the sinks toward the far end of the latrine, singing, “We shall overcome!”

  He seemed happy and harmless (he had a great ability to seem), so I left him alone. As I left, I heard him shout, “Overcome! You’ve heard of overkill? Well, this is Overcome! Sperm whales of the world, unite! We shall overcome!” Then laughter mixed with the spasmodic gurgle of vomit. Then: “And the angel of the Lord thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of God’s wrath.” I shook my head and walked back to Novotny’s room.

  If I had any questions as to the stability of the men of my trick after my encounter in the latrine, Novotny’s room answered them. They were, to the man, crazy. They called it “going Asiatic.” Six or seven drunks — they didn’t stand for counting — packed the room like an overcrowded cage of underfed monkeys. They chattered, they laughed and shouted in high, tired voices, they snatched squatty brown bottles of San Miguel beer from a waterproof bag filled with ice and drank them in quick selfish gulps as if afraid they might be stolen before finished. I accepted the offered beer and sat on the bunk next to Novotny.

  “There’s a drunk crawling around the latrine,” I said.

  “Don’t sweat it. That’s Mornin’ and he gets like that sometimes. He’s our demonstrator and Freedom Fucker.” He snipped off the ends of his words with the tight little grin of the night before.

  “Well, he said he was all right. Except for his left mandible,” I said, holding up my right hand.

  “I don’t give a shit who he calls it,” shouted a small fellow suddenly dancing in front of me. “Don’t care at all, just so he keeps decking them flyboys away. Deck ‘em away, away!” he said, slamming a fist into his other hand, ignoring the beer he held. Foam sparkled in his heavy black eyebrows and beer ran down his cheeks. “Saved me from that airman, he did. Swept him off my back like a fly. Boom! Swish!” Another fountain of beer. “Might have killed me, mac,” he said, holding his collar away from his tiny neck to expose six or eight blood-crusted scratches.

  “Airman tried to give him a higher asshole with a rum bottle,” Novotny explained casually. “Then Mornin’ got the airman. That’s what they’re doing back so early. APs don’t understand that sort of shit.”

  “Sgt. Krummel,” Novotny added, thumbing at me.

  “Cagle, mac,” the small one said, holding out a hairy little hand.

  “Caglemack?” I asked, shaking it.

  “Just Cagle,” he said, wrapping his whole tiny face around a cigar. He continued dancing like a doll on a string, a leg this way, an arm that, and all the while his black little moustache wriggled and squirmed as if trying to crawl off his upper lip into his mouth. “Boom!” he shouted, whirling to the other side of the room. “Swish! Fly, flyboy, fly!”

  I listened to the recounting of the three days, the new fuck at so-and-so’s, the arguments, Levenson’s tumble into the creek — he was pointed out as the naked, dreamy one in the corner, nonchalantly nude — the fight again, Franklin’s walk past a girl with the clap without catching another dose, and what a wonderful, awful Break it had been, hadn’t it? Their frenzy increased with each beer. They asked more than three days could have: life, love, and happiness.

  After a couple of beers I went back to check on Morning. He was sitting on the lip of the shower stall, leaning against the frame, and beating his head on the tile, singing again, but the song was too soft to hear.

  “Hey, you need a hand?” I asked. He was hitting his head quite hard against the tile.

  He stopped, but still sang. He sighed, and looked up calmly. He seemed tired, looked haggard. Just that second it came to me that he was not as drunk as he wanted me to think, but drunker than he realized.

  “I didn’t mean to kill my brother, you know,” he said in a quiet, normal voice, a very collegiate voice which might have advertised fraternity blazers on the radio. “I didn’t mean to.” He had been crying.

  “Sure, buddy, I know,” I said, helping him to a sink. I ran cold water over his head for several minutes before he raised his face to the mirror. He stared at his reflection, then dried his glasses and said, “When I was a kid, I used to lay in bed after they made me turn the light off, used to lay there and make faces in the dark until I had one I thought was pretty good. Then I’d run to the bathroom and flip on the light to see it in the mirror.” He paused, replaced his glasses — Army glasses with colorless rims which should have seemed out of place on his face, but they gave him a bemused, scholarly dignity — and looked at me. “Now I come down at night to make sure I’m not making a face, just to be sure.” He shook the water off his hands, glanced once more into the mirror without expression, then walked slowly out.

  Back in Novotny’s room, another beer in hand, I told him what Morning had said about killing his brother.

  “Ain’t got no brothers. Just drunk again,” he answered.

  “Morning’s my friend,” Cagle chimed, “but he’s a lousy fucking drunk sometimes.”

  “How do you know?” Novotny asked, his grin sly.

  “What the hell you mean, ‘How do you know?’ ” he answered, mimicking Novotny’s clipped words and grin. “I’ve known him since basic, that’s how I know.”

  “Bullshit,” Novotny said calmly, challenging the world.

  “What do you mean, ‘bullshit!?’ ” Cagle’s voice was high and shrill, and he stomped his foot. “Huh?”

  “Never seen him drunk when you weren’t too, you little hairy fart, so how the hell do you know how drunk he gets. And speaking of lousy drunks, who was it beat up that jukebox? and who can’t go in the Tango anymore ‘cause they don’t pay for their beer? and just who the hell did the APs find under that Flip’s house at three in the morning?”

  “You never seen a woman so ugly. I couldn’t believe that guy was really going to screw her, even if she was his wife. I had to see,” Cagle said, smiling at the memory. “Didn’t get written up, so fuck you, Navaho, and your pinto pony too.”

  “Keep away from my woman, piss ant,” Novotny laughed and turned to me. “Ask the Beetle there,” he said, pointing at Cagle, “how many times he’s fallen on his fucking head and busted up an eyebrow. Everytime something hits the floor, everybody stands up and says, ‘Okay, where’s that fucking bug? Got to take him back and get his goddamned eyebrow stitched up again.’ “

  “There’s a man knows a fine scar when he sees one,” Cagle said, pointing at the four inch half-moon on my cheek. He showed me the crosshatching of thin white scars hidden in his brows. “How about…”

  “Oughta take up a collection to buy the Beetle a crash helmet for drinking,” Novotny interrupted.

  As the hours passed I began to feel some responsibility as trick chief to get everyone to bed for a Little sleep before 0645. How should I play sergeant, I asked my beer bottle. An authoritative hint: “All right men
, six o’clock comes pretty early!” A fawning plea: “Okay you guys, let’s break it up, huh? Get a little beauty sleep, you know, ha, ha.” Or a Listen-I’m-one-of-you-boys-and-I-hate-to-say-this-but-we-better-hit-the-sack sonnet. Perhaps just stand, flex my muscles, curl the ends of my moustache, and order, “Stop this shit.” By the time I finally decided to hell with them and that their sleep was their business, the gathering ended as neatly and naturally as I could have hoped. The three-day frenzy was over for them, and the six-day drag just beginning. Letters they had meant to write, sleep they had hoped to catch up on, and last-Break resolutions never to go to Town again were all lost chances. Fatigue muffled their “Goodnight, shitheads” and fogged their red-rimmed eyes and wrapped around them like tattered old blankets.

  From my bunk, as I had a final cigarette and the night breeze stroked me, I heard Morning’s record player from across the hall. A high, thin female voice drifted easily around a guitar, sounding very small in the night.

  2

  Operations

  The job of the 721st involved a sort of reverse spying for the Filipino military establishment on themselves. They provided us with schedules and frequencies of transmissions in certain areas, and we recorded the messages — Morse code groups by typewriter (mill) and voice on tape — and then the Filipinos checked for security violations by individual operators. These violations were nothing so dramatic as giving information to the enemy (nonexistent, anyway), but were usually on the order of one operator (op) saying so long to another op when he was being transferred or discharged, or the transmission of a message in the clear when it was supposed to be encoded. This was supposed to be a foolproof scheme to double-check on their communications security — but things proof against a fool are seldom of any help against a clever man.

  Joe Morning was clever. If he thought he might be recording a violation, he would manage to lose the signal at just that moment. He claimed no desire to punish some hapless Pfc in another army making even less money than he. After the newness of the work wore off, I tended to agree with him, just so it didn’t happen too obviously; but at first I stayed on his back once I found out what he was doing. It was to his credit, I suppose, that he admitted what he was doing without being accused.

  The afternoon of the first day I discovered his game with the static and security violations. I was checking copy-sheets, filing the necessary carbons and placing the originals in the attaché case the Filipino officer would pick up at 1530. I noticed that most of the copy was quite good for the day-trick, when interference was heaviest, except for Morning’s which was spotted with marks of ((((((GARBLED-GARBLED-GARBLED)))))) (((QSA NIL QSA NIL))) ((HERE NIL MORE HEARD — QSK 5 X 5)). I checked his next scheduled transmission on the extra console, and although the op had an unusual style of keying, he was so loud he might have been next door. Morning’s copy was again spotty. I thought perhaps he might not be a good Morse op, but later in the afternoon I watched him copy, with two fingers, a Chinese Communist (Chi Com) propaganda station sending 35 words per minute clear text Spanish. Morning copied without a mistake, almost without effort; he was a fine op. Only Novotny might be better. Morning stayed with the Chi Com a few minutes into his next schedule (sked). When he finished with it, I mentioned something about the quality of his copy earlier in the day, hoping he would understand that I knew what he was doing.

  “Well, Sgt. Krummel, I had both ends on that sked,” he said, pointing to the copy I was holding, “and this one fellow’s wife is expecting her first and the other guy’s wife has had six kids, so he was telling him not to worry. They were talking in clear text, but it just didn’t seem right to bust a guy because he gets excited about his wife having a kid. More people should care about their wives that way.” He answered me as if there could be no question about it. (He had the ability of never sounding wrong — not in any pushy way, but purely in his self-possession and confidence that he knew the truth.) It pleased me that he had confessed without being accused, but it left me in the position of either letting him get away with it or being against expectant fathers.

  “Okay, Morning, but watch that sort of thing or there will be more than a father to get busted.” Already he had me on shifting ground. “I don’t like waves, and I don’t like trouble, and that kind of shit makes for stormy, stinky waters.” Who was I kidding? I was hooked. I didn’t know quite how much just yet.

  “Sure. I will. I’m really sorry,” he said frankly, “but that guy was so damned excited, so worried, I just couldn’t get him in trouble.” Morning smiled, and I remembered hearing the quivering urgency of his keying when I had listened and now understood those handfuls of dits and dahs he had so frantically been throwing on the air, then I smiled too.

  “God, it’s taken him eight years to make corporal, and with a kid he’s going to need the extra money,” Morning said, at ease now that he knew I wasn’t going to push him. His voice was friendly; he was talking to me, not my stripes.

  “I thought they were talking about kids?”

  “Yeah, this time, but I knew from before. He has such an odd fist, I can always tell when he’s working. I remember when he made corporal. He broke into clear text then too. But he doesn’t usually do that. He’s really a good op, Sarge.”

  “Remind me to give the net to someone who isn’t a member of the family, Morning. Jesus.”

  “He’s being transferred to an automatic Morse net next month.” Morning couldn’t keep from grinning, and he knew neither could I.

  “Well, goddamn, I guess you Dear Abbys are going to miss him and his family troubles,” I said to the Trick in general. “I’ll see if the chaplain’s office doesn’t need some extra help. Or maybe I can let you all open a home for unwed mothers in your spare time.”

  “Need something exciting around this fucking place,” Novotny growled, “and I reckon unwed mothers would be just the right thing.” A few chuckles followed, then they turned back to their work, not yet sure of me. It isn’t easy to trust the man who gives the orders.

  “Sgt. Krummel, I’m really sorry about the trouble. But you get so damned bored around this place, and thinking of the guy on the other end of this business as a buddy makes things pass easier. No one likes to be a sneak and a tattletail to boot,” Morning said. “But I am sorry.”

  “Forget it. And don’t tell me about the Chinese spy you keep in business because his mother’s sick. Don’t tell me.”

  “If I don’t tell you, how will you know?”

  “I don’t want to know. Anything.”

  There was never any more trouble. I kept Morning on the higher echelon nets where the ops were more careful and on the training nets where the ops were sloppy and mistakes and violations came every sked. In spite of the smoothness of that problem, Morning always had the ability to get me mixed up in his crap. Never again, I said, walking back to my desk, Never again. But I was already holding my breath, waiting for the waves. (Morning would have said that my involvement with him was as much my fault as his, which is true. He was my fault. But I took care of that in Vietnam.)

  The operating section of our building was contained on a single ground floor room, with most of the space taken up by electronic equipment and desks, but with a small area left open for the trick chief’s desk, coffee pot and weapons’ rack. The Detachment officers, as opposed to the company officers, a major, two captains and four lieutenants, had offices, for some never explained reason, underground, reached by an outside stairwell. They occupied these holes only in the daylight and seldom bothered with the actual operation of the Det unless an unusual problem arose. I quickly learned that work on the ground floor could proceed untroubled by the “Head Moles” as they were called. This peace was increased by a warning system installed in the air-conditioning unit by the Trick radio-repairman, Quinn. When a badge was inserted into the key slot which opened the front doors, the compressor coughed shyly. With this early warning system the men relaxed in a way unusual for enlisted men so near officers. My only rea
l duty was to be sure that the Sked Chart was met and copied in all the bullshit sessions, the word games and general gold-bricking which made up the bulk of the hours. I settled that quickly: “Any op I catch missing skeds loses his pass for seven days, no questions asked.” I got everyone’s pass except Quinn’s the first two days, then signed the three-day passes for the Break as if I had forgotten. The Trick understood, but they weren’t my Trick yet.

  The Trick and I seemed to work well in the beginning — more credit to them than to me. They were a good group. Only Quinn and Peterson had not been to college, which might have been unusual for the Army as a whole, but was about the average for the 721st. None of the men were draftees dislodged from their life plans, but all had enlisted, probably because their lives were already out of joint. Only Collins had finished college; the others had flunked out or quit. Any one of them might, and did, cause God knows what trouble in Town, but only Franklin would at Operations. He was an unhappy kid who had gone to MIT on a math scholarship, then been ejected for peeing in a main lounge on Mother’s Day. He never caused any real trouble because he, alone, thought my return to the Army a gallant gesture: a big, fat finger to the world. He liked that.

  We worked well together then, the Trick and I, but it wasn’t like later when we would march down the streets of Town ten men strong, and they would sing “We are Krummers Raiders / We’re rapists of the night / We’re dirty son of a bitches / And rather fuck than fight!” That was fine.

  Oddly enough it was through Franklin, rather than my first friends, Novotny, Cagle, and Morning, that the Trick and I became united. The seventh night of my first set of mids Franklin came to work drunk. Nothing unusual. In fact at least half of the men came to every mid-trick a little bit drunk. And Franklin had been having problems with his family since he had written a letter home telling about his being busted for indecent exposure — peeing in the street; everyone did it, but not on AP jeeps — and that he was in love with a Filipino barmaid, a nice girl who didn’t work in the rooms out back, a lovely girl, and he couldn’t believe she loved him. He had acne, a dead-white skin and long, greasy blond hair. The Devil as a juvenile delinquent. His parents had replied to his honest confession and plea for understanding with a Dear John asking him not to return home, ever. Franklin was nineteen and believed it. The first thing he did was seduce the girl, first with a cigarette, then a drink, then a trip out back. He stayed drunk for a week afterward, but had caused me no trouble, until this night.