One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  I found the Trick about a mile out the gate highway, walking in a shambling group, and I assumed they were looking for a cab until I saw the case of beer on Morning’s shoulder, the bottles flashing in every hand. Franklin was taking a leak as he walked and the others were trying to stay out of range; Quinn had a beer in each hand, taking alternate drinks with military precision. I pulled up behind them and their faces and hands scrambled for a moment trying to hide the beer, then Quinn saw me getting out of the jeep and he smiled and shouted, “Hey, Morning, get old man Krummel a beer.”

  “Throw the beer in the ditch and fall in,” I said.

  They all smiled and walked toward me, Morning with an offered beer.

  “Throw the beer in the ditch and fall in,” I repeated. Smiles became perplexed. “Now!” They huddled back upon themselves. “Right now!” Collins bent over to try to set his beer down without spilling it. “Throw them in the ditch.” He did. Morning threw the beer he had been offering me, flung it against the ground, and his eyes glared “what the shit” but he was too angry to say it. “Fall in!”

  “What the fuck’s with you, Krummel?”

  “Sgt. Krummel to you, Pfc Morning,” I said as I took the half-empty case off his shoulder and pitched it in the ditch. Again his anger stifled his voice, and in his silence the others attempted a formation based on his unmoving figure.

  “Attention,” I ordered, and attention I got as they gathered old instincts and shuffled into straighter lines, stiffer stances. Morning still stood at an angle, half-crouched as if his anger curled his guts, his face scattered in wrath, mouth open, an eyebrow questioningly raised, a mad eye, the whole structure flushed in frustration, quilted in grief. I told him to straighten up. He did, and rage tightened his body into quivering stone, the first tentative nudge of an earthquake. He began to stammer, his lips jittering and a spray of spit flying out; but I told him to knock it off before his mouth could shape a word.

  “Dress right, dress!” Again the training memories came back after a wondering moment. Morning had his mouth shut now, his face clenched like a fist; thumb screws, bamboo splinters, nor the rack could have made him say shit — but I did.

  “I don’t know what kind of little gathering this is, but I want you people to know, it’s over.”

  “Shit.”

  “One more word, Morning,” I hissed into his very face, “even a grunt, and you are through.” Before he could test me, I shouted, “Right face. Forward march. Double-time march,” and then he was trapped with the others, stumbling along the road. “Novotny, fall out and see if you can keep cadence for these girl scouts.” I climbed back in the jeep and followed them as they ran the two miles on out to Operations. Everyone threw up at least once, and Haddad had to be half-carried half dragged between Quinn and Collins. All their backs reflected the shame which was on their faces; except Morning. They all knew something, except Morning; not so much their error, because that wasn’t important, but the breaking of a trust, making me have to play the hard-ass (perhaps more ass than hard). A broken trust, a defiled faith, so we were all ashamed. Except Morning, and his anger spoke eloquently of the guilt he bore. We both knew whose idea the beer had been, and I wondered if this confrontation hadn’t been what he had been after all this time. His rage blossomed so wonderfully when he was guilty; he indulged his anger, perhaps because with something outside to hate the vague phantom-demon he hated in himself let him alone, and together both halves hated not in an arithmetical progression of one plus one, but geometrically as dynamite adds to dynamite, so that he must explode. The others would be loosed from their shame by this run, and then a single joke, a laugh, and then we would be back in this thing together. But I wondered if Morning and I would have to fight to ease his guilt. I thought this might be the easy way (and I sometimes, when bed sores tickle my guilt, think it might have been the best way). His guilt, my shame eased in a blind flurry of fists, and afterwards battered faces, grins splitting bleeding lips, friendship cemented — but only if we fought to a draw, for neither of us could bear to lose in front of the other — his guilt, my shame eased. (Let me mention, lest you think I worried overlong about doing my job, that mine was perhaps the easier to endure. I was riding in the jeep, and he was struggling in the ditch. The twentieth century hasn’t quite convinced me that physical pain is easier to bear than mental pain. Not quite. Keep that in mind.)

  I hailed two taxis and sent them to Ops where they were waiting; the drivers laughing at the panting, puking rabble I herded into the compound. Reid met me at the gate with pale questions and whimpering objections, but I shut him up with a promise that we would make up twice the time the next two nights and told him that everything was all right. That’s what he wanted to hear: that everything was all right. Had he for a moment suspected that his wife’s lover had arranged this delay? His face answered, Don’t they always.

  I told him that I would appreciate it if that dick-head Dottlinger didn’t hear about the incident. He hesitated before answering, and I wanted to scream the truth at him. But he was really worried about who was going to pay for the cabs. So I did. Then I went to get Morning and we went out back.

  Turning from me, he walked over to the fence, anger still shaking his hands. “Well, what the hell you want?” he asked when I didn’t say anything.

  “What do I want? What do you want? A stunt like that — Jesus Christ, Morning.”

  “So I screwed up, man. So what? Didn’t you ever make a mistake? Didn’t this shit ever get to you? Is it ever too much?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, turning as the beacon on the control tower turned. “Just too much.”

  “You make me sound like a sergeant: but that’s no excuse. We’re all in the same shit.”

  “It’s not a fucking excuse, it’s a reason. Can’t…” Silent for a moment, he turned back to the fence, hung his fingers in the mesh, staring out like a… like lost child? caged animal?… more like a man who didn’t know if he wanted in or out, or even which side was in or out. “I’m just tired, man. I feel like I’m nine hundred years old. It’s all too much, the army, Town, this stupid job; it’s too much sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep forever, then I wouldn’t have to fuck with the world. I can’t stay straight; I can’t even go to hell right.” He paused; I waited.

  “That’s funny. I was thinking about something today, you know. About problems. I used to be good at math, you know,” he said, speaking as he had that first time I saw him talking to the mirror, detached, commenting on his soul as if it were a problem of formulas. “Really good at math. I should have majored in math or physics or engineering or something like that. At least that’s what they always said, and I might have, if I hadn’t tried to major in accounting to spite my old lady. God, you know, she used to put my old man down for being a bookkeeper. A cipher, she called him. Classic, huh? So classic it’s a bore, you know.

  “But there was another reason, too, why I didn’t major in math. I didn’t understand… I couldn’t… I could work problems, could really work hell out of them. And not just plugging numbers into a formula either. When I started calculus, in high school, the teacher gave us a problem, something about getting a ladder around a corner in a hall, just to show us what one looked like. And I worked the damn thing without calculus. She couldn’t believe it. She loved me because I was her best student, but for a moment I could tell that she thought I had done something wrong, and she never liked me after that for some reason. But I worked the damned problem, by God, I worked it, just like I solved all the other ones, but the thing is, the thing always was, I didn’t know how I knew how to work it. I didn’t understand why my mind worked that way. No one else could work it, but it was easy for me, but I didn’t know why, or how. I could just do, you know, but I couldn’t understand how, and that almost drove me bugs, man.

  “Just like when I started school. I could read before I started the first grade, and I knew that no one else could, so when t
his old bitch starts off with flash cards and the alphabet crap, I raised my hand and asked, “Where are the books?” The class all laughed and giggled, and Miss Minder, who was old and hated kids, probably for good reason, threw a fourth-grade reader in my hands and told me to read and so I read, and when I finished a page, said, “Where are the hard books? This is only a fourth-grade reader.” All the kids laughed and Miss Minder almost cried she was so mad, and I thought I was going to be the leader of the band. But I quickly discovered that nobody liked me because I could read and they couldn’t, and then they didn’t like me because I made good grades. So for the next eight years, until it became all right to be smart, I was the dirtiest, dumbest kid in school. On purpose.” He paused as four jets roared over then settled like fat mallards against the runways.

  “Always had trouble with my head, man. But in high school I let it go; it was enough to be able to do it. It was like football: when the coaches tried to teach me how to throw a pass, tried to change the way I threw a pass, I couldn’t pass for shit, but my way, I could do it. Finally they left me alone, and I just threw the goddamned ball. But then that got to me too. Somehow I wasn’t throwing the ball, somebody else was. Or maybe it was more like having a machine in my head that plotted trajectories and found ranges and figured windage and force vectors and triggered the muscles. I always felt left out of the process.”

  “No,” I interrupted, taking the cigarette he offered, “you are the process.”

  “Aw, bullshit, that’s no good. I’m not part, if I don’t feel like I’m part, huh? No.

  “Then,” he said, pausing to light up, his face fired by the match, crimson like the hot exhausts of the jets coming over our heads, “Then at Carlton I found out something. The hard way.” He laughed, but it sounded more like a snort. “I was making it with this chick, this good chick, down in Madison. A good kid but, Jesus, a bad scene. I was drunk most of the time, and mad at her most of the time for reasons I still don’t understand. Maybe because she made me happy, maybe for no reason at all. But I’d get mad, madder than hell, then I’d tear her into little pieces. I made fun of her Church, her meatless Fridays — here’s a piece of meat for this Friday, I’d say — her family, her friends, then I’d screw her and make her cry with passion, then laugh at her hypocritical tears, as I called them.” He nicked his cigarette over the fence, then walked back into the shadows next to the building.

  “But she loved me, man, and she hung on, though God knows why. All the way. Until one really bad night when I was drunk, blind, stupid, black-out drunk, laying on the floor of her apartment, beating my head on the tiles, keeping time to the music from the beer joint below. I busted my head all up and bled all over the place, broke furniture and all that kind of shit. And that was all right; but I wouldn’t stop it with the head, beating away, and she couldn’t stop me, and I wouldn’t stop until I finally drank and battered myself into oblivion.” He lit another cigarette. His face was as tired as his voice in the quick light.

  “Then the next morning she said, very calmly, very plainly, that this was too much. “Too much, Joe,’ she said. ‘You hate yourself too much. Either I’ll get lost when you get your head and heart together, or else I’ll get torn up in the fight. That’s too much,’ she said.

  “I hated losing her,” he said, looking up at me, “and I gave her all the horseshit about being afraid to live and too ignorant to die, which was just true enough to really hurt — I seem to know weak spots naturally, too — but I sort of understood something about myself, why I’d been beating my head on the floor. I hated it, pure and simple, and in spite of my new attempts at being an intellectual, I hated my head because it wasn’t part of me. It has always felt like somebody’s head besides mine, and I didn’t understand, and I hated. She didn’t understand either, but she knew enough to get the hell out of the way. Enough.” He stopped talking again, and a jet engine being tested filled the silence with a steady, grating roar which seemed to rise out of the very night itself. Something was waiting in the darkness, an animal, a beast, all mouth and desire, growling, eating the very darkness, dissatisfied with the night.

  “So what the hell did you want?” he said suddenly, shaking his head.

  “I thought I wanted to beat your damned head in. But I guess I… I guess not. Let’s go in before that noise makes idiots of us all. Stay cool. Lt. Dottlinger is after your ass; he knows that you were the organizer of the mutiny.”

  Morning started to say something, stopped, then said, “Don’t sweat it. I can take my own licks. If he wants me so much I may let him have all of me.” A rice bug, a pale cockroach-looking, flying beast as big as your thumb, crawled along the sidewalk, stunned from dashing into the wall under the floodlights. Morning stomped him into a brown spot

  “He’s smarter than you think, and he’s drowning, Joe and he’ll hurt you. He knows how to do that, if nothing else ” I said, pausing at the door.

  “You should know,” he said, grinning like Novotny. “They can’t hurt me, man. Not any more.”

  “Not if you keep setting me up for the kill,” I said, smiling too.

  Inside I shouted something about the Trick calling me if they needed to go to the latrine because after tonight it was obvious that they couldn’t pee without it running down their legs. They laughed, shot me the finger, assaulted my mother’s virtue, and we were all okay again. I told Novotny to police up the beer bottles on the way in.

  “Hey, I’m ah… I’m…” he tried to say.

  “Next time you want to get in some close order drill, tell me. I’ll arrange it.”

  “Don’t do us any favors,” Morning said as I left.

  It was over for now, and I enjoyed the cool peace of the night on my way back.

  But, God, it’s never over. The finger of God is never satisfied always moving, always rewriting life, always making a scene go on and on until even He must cry, “God, will it never end,” even as His finger moves on.

  * * *

  “Where are they at?” Tetrick shouted at me as he came in the Orderly Room the next morning. Red splotches of frustration interrupted the yellow of his face. “You’ve got to be kidding me? Say it ain’t so. Get ‘em in here, Krummel, now. Every one of them.” I managed between flying arms and screams to get him into Saunders’ office. “Whatever you’re gonna say, no! already. I want those idiots in here.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean, no?” he shouted.

  “They’re my trick. You said so. I took care of it. You hang them, you hang me.”

  “I should hang myself. How could they do a thing like that? The Lieutenant will kill us all,” he said.

  “He’ll never know.”

  “He knows everything. He has a spy system better than the CIA. God,” he groaned, rubbing his shining head, “what’s next? No, don’t tell me. I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Football season is next. Three weeks, then all the anger can go somewhere else.” I felt as if I should comfort him, maybe pat his shoulder, because he really did care about his troops. I’d never seen anybody like Tetrick before.

  “Football, huh? Maybe you will all get killed.” He shuffled out as fast as his feet would let him. I followed. Dottlinger was standing in the middle of the door waiting for someone to call “Attention.” Dottlinger gave “At ease” his usual arrogant inflection, which made it mean exactly the opposite: “Don’t relax a second,” it said. He raised an eyebrow as if to ask what we had been doing in Saunders’ office, but he didn’t ask; he had other things on his mind; he was next.

  * * *

  No one ever quite figured how Dottlinger came up with the idea, but he did, and that same day he called a Pfc from the motor pool, a repairman from Trick Four, and Morning into his office to inform them that a board of officers would be assembled to decide if they should be undesirably discharged for immoral conduct. The other two were real trouble-makers — the Pfc got his kicks by beating up whores, and the repairman had gotten written up by the AP
s every time he went to Town — but Morning’s only sin was reporting three cases of the clap to the hospital.

  Nearly everyone caught the clap in the PI; I think the official rate is about sixty percent, but that doesn’t take into account the married men with wives and without who were faithful, nor unreported cased treated by doctors in Town, which would probably put the rate for single enlisted men around eighty percent. Everyone on the trick except Collins and myself had fallen prey to the sly gonococci. Collins was reasonably faithful to his wife and extraordinarily careful about not catching the clap, wearing two condoms, only fucking on Wednesday afternoons when the whores received the results of their Tuesday morning smears, always carrying a bar of antiseptic soap in his pocket, and other such precautions which seemed to take the fun out of it, which may have been exactly what he was trying to do. I had already had my punishment from a sixteen-year-old high school girl in Atlanta, Georgia, on a three-day pass in 1953, and so I was somewhat more cautious than the others. Franklin had had six doses; he claimed one more notch than Quinn with five. But like everyone else, they went to the doctors in Town for their penicillin, so the hospital never knew. But Morning always said that he wasn’t going to take any chances with such a fun thing as his privates; no hypos of Wildroot Cream Oil masquerading as pencillin for him. So he went to the hospital all three times, the last time about a month before. The hospital always made a routine report of the third case to the unit commanders, but usually a bit of fatherly advice was all that happened. Service policy had changed from the days when a dose was an automatic bust; in fact thousands of posters pleaded with the troops to report to the hospital and promised no disciplinary measures. But an undesirable discharge is an administrative action, technically, so Dottlinger had his way to Morning.

  Perhaps Dottlinger understood that, being a good (really), middle-class Southern boy, Morning probably felt guilty as hell about the doses anyway and that he probably bought the usual nonsense paraded everywhere in America — schools, colleges, corporations — that achievement is measured by collecting pieces of paper, and that a bad piece of paper, a bad discharge, like a criminal record, would haunt a man right into the grave (when in reality, no one ever asks to see your goddamned discharge anyway).