One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  At first Morning seemed unconcerned, as if he understood the game and could care less about playing it. He drank the ritual fifth of VO, then tied the yellow and black ribbon from the neck of the bottle into his button hole, identifying him as a short-timer. He strutted around laughing and quipping, “I’m so short I can sleep in a matchbox, so short that when I fart, I blow sand in my eyes, so short.” But I saw, perhaps, a truer picture of how he was taking it one night during the next Break in the weight room.

  (I lift weights, barbells, you understand; it’s been a secret long enough. I like it, in fact, I’m very snobbish about it. I dislike people with skinny arms who call it boring; I dislike pretty boys with their definition bulging and rippling like snakes coiling in a sack; I dislike hulks who think a 400-pound miliary press is the highest man can reach; but at the same time I’ve held each of these attitudes once, and am now quite sure that mine is unique, far superior, perhaps the only worthy attitude. I think weight lifting is beautiful, an art of circles, curves and graceful arcs, a delicate symmetry, an hypnotic calm in the repetition, a powerful contentment when the skin seems too small for the muscle.)

  I was nearly finished with the workout, pleased with my body, really pleased that I had finally kept one resolution to spend a peaceful Break away from Town, when, through the louvers, I saw Morning get out of a cab. The light in the weight room was the only light on the second floor so his eyes rose naturally to it, but because of the artful deception of the screen, he couldn’t see me. But he shouted, anyway, “Lift and toil, Krummelkeg, you virtuous, muscle-bound, ant-brained idiot.”

  “Ah, ‘tis Daemon Rum his-self,” I answered.

  Shortly, he came in, more tired than drunk, face sunburnt and drawn, but his eyes glittered like glass ornaments. The bow of his short-timer’s ribbon, untied, drooped like a pennant in the rain.

  I asked why he was back, suspecting the worst.

  “Just tired,” he said, fooling me again, rubbing the stubble of beard. “I been sweatin’… sitting in a swing all day. Talkin’, talkin’ to a sweet little girl.”

  “You found a new way,” I grunted, doing my first set of squats.

  “No, man, really, a little girl. Bow-legged Dottie’s little girl. Went over with Quinn to fence some records for… so Dottie could. Anyway, he had to screw her first, and they made me take the kid out to the swing, you know, one of those old-fashioned bench swings.” He sat heavily on the edge of the mat, then flopped back, an arm covering his eyes. “So, man, I spent all morning popping bennies and drinking beer while Quinn was farting around. Then he and Dottie went off to sell the stuff and made me stay with the kid, but by then I wouldn’t have left for anything. Great kid, lotsa bennies, and the kid would run to the sari-sari store for beer. She fixed us lunch, like a party. Beautiful lunch. First time I ever noticed how pretty food is. Tomatoes about the size of your thumb, tiny little red things; white rice, as white as the sun; little bitty raw fish, churds, or chaps or something, little gray devils; and those great little bananas sort of hovering between green and yellow. Hey, man, one of the bananas was a twin, you know, two bananas in one skin. Dottie’s kid said that’s the best kinda luck, twin bananas. She said if we ate them, the two of us, we would get married, and I said she didn’t want to marry me ‘cause I was no good, and she said she did want to marry me ‘cause I was so sad. Ain’t that great, man. So sad. Jesus Christ, what a kid. Nine years old, man, and she knows more about life than Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, and your fucking Edmund Burke all thrown together in Archimedes’ bathtub.” He laughed and sat up. “Hey, man, you ever see how silly you look doing squats. You look like the most constipated man in the world.” He laughed again.

  I finished the squats and put the weights up. “So go on. You got Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine and my fucking Edmund Burke in Archimedes’ tub singing ‘Im Forever Blowing Stinky Bubbles in the Tub.’ “

  “No, man, Plato don’t allow no singing. Aristotle ain’t singing, it ain’t in the plan; he’s just sitting there farting and bitin’ the bubbles when they come up and calling it a catharsis. Ca-fucking-tharsis! Augustine is trying to hide a hard-on, and Edmund Burke is casting a baleful eye on the whole proceedings, wishing he had a hard-on,” he crowed, “and Archimedes run off with a belly-dancer from Bayonne, New Jersey, who promised to teach him about spirals and specific gravity and the Archimedean screw.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” I said.

  “Maybe I should drink more,” he answered. “Particularly with lovely, sweet little girls. ‘Joe Morning,’ she said when I left, ‘How come you GIs all-a-time drunk?’ I think I love her.”

  “Yes, Pfc Morning, we’ve noted your interest in the younger members of opposite sex,” I said, mocking Dottlinger’s dry whine. In my own voice, I asked, “How many packages of gum did she sell you?” Dottie’s kid was one of the better con artists among the horde of gum and flower girls with bare feet and scraggly hair who were constantly in bars, day in day out, constant reminders of poverty and want, a constant whine at your sleeve, “You buy gum, joe?”

  Morning was silent for a second, then said, “You don’t believe in shit do you? Well, fuck you, golden-hearted cynic.”

  “Don’t sweat me, jack; I won’t be sitting on the board. They can’t make me tell about that twelve-year-old girl in Chew Chi’s hotel — at least she said she was twelve, didn’t she?” The night I had shared that black, rat-ridden room with the old woman, my first night in Town, digging, as it were, into the past, Morning had asked Dominic for something young and tender, and received, he discovered the next morning, a twelve-year-old girl in a red crepe-paper party dress with clumsy white valentine hearts stitched around the skirt.

  “I was drunk.”

  “You’re drunk now. Don’t snarl at me just because Dottlinger is after your ass. You made your own bed,” I said. (God, he could make me angry, and I, him.) “You didn’t tell me how much gum she stuck you with.”

  A sleepy grin wavered about his eyes as he emptied the pockets of the baggy light-blue pants he wore to Town. “I ain’t counted ‘em, yet.” He smiled. Twenty-six shiny green packages of Doublemint. “It was worth it; I love her. I think I love her.”

  “I think you ought to go to bed.”

  “No, sir. Benzedrine and sex don’t mix.”

  “To sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep; I’m too tired.” He paused, fingered his ribbon. “I’m too short to sleep; might miss my plane.”

  “Don’t sweat that. You can beat this thing,” I said. “Easy.”

  “Shit, man, you ought to read Slutfinger’s instructions to the board. ‘Subjects may show superficial intelligence and verbal ability, and attempt to make philosophical justification for immorality, but the board must keep the good of the service in mind rather than some vague good-of-man ideal that allows certain types of immorality, usually sexual, as long as the higher principles are followed. The board must remember that immorality is immorality.’ God, he loved reading it to me. I think he wrote it for me. Jesus, he’s crazy. It’s not me he’s putting out of the army ‘for the good of the service,’ it’s the whole twentieth century. Morning, Joseph J., unsuitable, sir, for duty in the service of God and Country because of a lewd and lascivious character established by the prima-facie evidence of three contractions of the vile disease of gonorrhea, an article fifteen company punishment for being caught off-limits in one of the most notorious dens of prostitution in the whole Philippines, if not the whole world, naked and, we can assume, having had subjected himself to carnal intercourse with these low women, and keeping constant company with a reputed pander and black-marketeer and an admitted homosexual, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “Did he say all that.”

  “No, but he will. He wants to, but he can’t spell all the words.” He stood up, walked to the screen, leaving a trail of dirty footprints across the canvas mat. “He’s gonna have my ass, like you said, one way or the other. Who gives a shit, rea
lly? They can’t hurt me.”

  “You can beat it. I’ll testify, Tetrick will, maybe even Capt. Harry if we push him.”

  “I’m not going to try. I’m tired, man. I told you that. I want to get out of this fucking, stupid, dirty country and the dumb goddamned army. I’m going back to the States.” He leaned his forehead against the screen. “Home for a while, then maybe back to Phoenix, maybe back to school…”

  “Not this way, for Christ’s sake.” I picked up a dumbbell and began doing one-handed curls. “We can beat it.”

  “… maybe Mississippi. I’ve got a friend with SNCC there.” He mumbled on, but I wasn’t listening.

  “Ellen’s in Mississippi,” I said absently. Mississippi looked as if it were going to once again take its toll on me. First Ellen and Ron Fowlers, now Joe Morning, I thought. Then an odd picture intruded, Joe and Ellen in bed. Somehow I knew if they met, and in Mississippi they must, she would fuck him with all that wonderful, religious, rebellious ardor she once spread for me. After long nights of talk, she had to have me, as if the words caressed her, a long flickering tongue of talk, and have me she did, a mount and a sudden charge. Even now the stale cigarette breath ripened by cheap beer, the dry lips, the sticky tongue, the hot, hot breath of a woman talking close and intense in your face… I was suddenly sorry I hadn’t gone with her to Mississippi that summer; but no — she had said, love me, love my cause — no, I said. But that pale hot face, pale mouth cuddling like a sleepy kitten against mine… “Huh?” I said as Morning poked me. My arm still curled absent mindedly, the muscles tight and hard and bitter now. “What?”

  “Go take a shower,” he muttered, turning back to the night. “You stink.”

  As I showered, he came down and we talked, but he seemed resigned, and refused to fight Dottlinger. (I recognize it now: The victim by falling may rise; one vanquished without a fight isn’t vanquished at all.) Afterwards we strolled to the Flight Line for a sandwich. Lightning skittered across the clouded face of Mount Arayat, silent flashes, then distant afterthoughts of quiet thunder. The walks and the streets and the grass gleamed wetly in the mist, the mist like tiny balls of light suspended in the cool night, the heart and coming of the rainy season delicately foretold. In spite of the threatening rain, the hesitant thunder, we walked quite slowly, speaking of home, of girls once touched, once known, of friends half-forgotten, drunken rides and football games. Once again Morning spoke of the girl from Madison. His face, drawn in fatigue, echoed the longing in his voice:

  “God, man, I miss her sometimes. Nights like this, sometimes in my rack just at dawn when the light is soft and the air… so much I don’t think I can stand it.” He shook his head. “But, Christ, I’d probably just treat her the same way again. Shit. You know what I did once. I was drunk again, always, and we’d fought, always, but had half made-up and were making love on her couch, covered with tears and recriminations, but then she whispered something desperate about love — we’d prom… I’d made her promise never to say “love” — then all the anger came back, and I jerked out, then sat on the side of the couch, jacking off. She started crying again, moaning, and asking me “why? why?” in this goddamned sad little whimper. So I told her why, good old Joe Morning told her why: ‘Less complicated than fucking you, bitch.’ Isn’t that lovely. You know, I wonder why she took so long to leave me.” He looked up, waiting, it seemed, for me to speak. When I didn’t, he seemed embarrassed by the confidence, and quickly walked on.

  “Some of my best friends are bastards,” I said as I caught up to him.

  He smiled, then poked me on the arm, and said, “Yeah. Mine, too.”

  After eating sawdust hamburgers, we went back to the barracks and drank a fifth of Dewar’s he had been saving for the market, sipping straight from the bottle, then dashing to the water fountain for a chaser, but by the time a sullen grey daylight floated like fog out of the dawn, we were chasing Scotch with Scotch, dreams with whiskey, laughter with tears.

  At noon Novotny found Morning sleeping under my table, his head on the Lattimore translation of the Iliad that Ellen had given me for Christmas the third year we were married. It might have been a more suitable pillow for me, but I was on guard, crouched in the corner, asleep but not dreaming, the empty bottle cradled in my arms, a dead soldier.

  * * *

  I stayed abed and nursed my hangover the next day, but Morning was up before three and back in Town. Novotny, Quinn and Cagle brought him back just before curfew. He had passed out in Lenny’s, and when they tried to move him upstairs, he woke up insane. With the arms draped around Novotny’s and Quinn’s shoulders he banged their heads together, then turned and ran out over Cagle. By the time they had collected themselves and gotten outside, Morning had disappeared, but they heard screams from the Keyhole, and raced there. Morning had ripped the door from its hinges as he ran in and had shouted, “I’m gonna kill me an airman.” When the others came in, Morning was chasing the smallest airman in the world around and around a table. They wrestled him outside just as the Air Police jeep drove up. Luckily, Novotny knew one of the APs and persuaded him to let them take Morning back to base.

  He woke me screaming and shouting as they tried to tug him out of the taxi. Novotny and Quinn finally sat on his back while Cagle tied his hands behind him; Cagle was gagging him with a dirty handkerchief when I got downstairs. A steady rain began to slant across the bands of light as we picked Morning up. Perhaps the rain, perhaps the drink, something had washed the mask from his face. As I leaned over to grasp his shoulders, the hate blazed from his eyes, stunning, savage, blood-lined eyes directing malevolence, loathing, and God-forbidden hate; the mad, mad eyes of St. John the Divine casting God’s wrath and bitterness against the fruit of man, great, blood-lust hate to cleanse the world in blood and fare. “… And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of the wrath of God…” How many times had I heard Morning shouting that mad verse in a drunken and surely, half-serious vein. His anger condemned the earth, and I nearly dropped him when his hate flamed up at my face. I might have dropped him, but the eyes suddenly clouded and the mask returned like the closing of a great portal, a thick iron door trundled across the opening in the earth, sealing the rift in the crust which sank deep into the night, into the fire of eternal night.

  Upstairs we threw him into the center of the stall and turned all the showers cold, turned them on him. He lay very still, his eyes closed. His previous noise had drawn a crowd, but Morning remained motionless, bathed in the rushing water, silent, until even the group of curious began to leave. By then the leather belt stretched enough, so he slipped his hands out. He sat up, untied his feet, but left the gag. Sitting there, his eyes clouded by streams of water, he very methodically removed his shoes, his fingers operating so exactly on the laces, denying their wet, wrinkled infirmity. Quickly, he threw his shoes at us. One, wet, slipped out of his hand and hit the ceiling; the other speared Cagle in the shin. While Cagle danced on one leg, we laughed, then were silent as we realized the silence, the waterfall silence, that we had broken for the first time. Before this, not a single word had been spoken.

  Morning responded to the laughter. He scrabbled to his feet and began a damp, slippery stripper’s parody of sloshy bumps and clammy grinds. He went on for long minutes, dancing, stripping, until he wore only the jockey shorts he wore to Town and the gag binding his face as tightly as wire imbedded around a live tree trunk. He did much more, stuffed his shorts down the drain, fell down, ripped the gag from his mouth and began screaming “Mother-fucker! Mother-fucker!” until finally we carried him to his bunk, tied him with web belts and shoe laces, gagged him once more, then left him to his struggles and dreams.

  On the way to our rooms, Novotny said, “Just crazy. Sometimes he’s just crazy. One time he’s drunk okay, then he’s crazier than a poisoned coyote. I saw him run through a wall in his girl’s apartment in Madison one night just ‘cause she had th
e rag on and wouldn’t put out for him. Crazy. Don’t know.” He turned into his room, his broad back wrinkling in perplexity, a discomfort I also shared. Who knew Joe Morning? Surely not I.

  From my bunk I could hear his teeth gritting, grinding through the gag, his cot rattling against the cold concrete floor, his bonds aching against the flesh, his voice, muted, silent, persuasive in the night.

  * * *

  I woke, wondered why because it was still dark, but then realized the silence. More out of sleepy habit than purpose, I got up to glance toward Morning’s room and saw him wrapped in a blanket, walking slowly toward the stairwell. I dressed and followed, half-cursing, twice-intrigued (God, it seems as if I spent my whole life trailing after Morning, following him; two vaudeville acts, he the magician, me the strong man with a magic of my own, forever on the same endless circuit). I found him in one of the drainage ditches at the edge of the company area. The rain had changed to drizzle gently floating from gray, clotted clouds drifting ten feet above the barracks.

  “You take me to raise?” he asked as I stood above and behind him.

  “You came so I would follow,” I said. “You all right?” I asked, climbing into the ditch with him.

  “I’m always all right. Or I would be if you’d stop following me around like a maiden aunt worried about my virtue.”

  “I’m a member of the Dottlinger spy organization.” I sat down, but he said nothing and his silence hung as close as the clouds about us. Out of the American tradition of male comradeship I offered him a cigarette as I might have a wounded soldier, but the rain killed my match and he threw it away. We sat for a long time in the stolid mists before he spoke.