One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  I went to the Provost Marshal’s Office and found a smart Dartmouth lawyer serving his time with a wry smile and a wonderful ability to beat courts-martial. I explained, with some slight exaggeration, Morning’s plight, and within the hour he had called Dottlinger, quoted some legal, Latin nonsense to him (I think I overheard Illegitimi Non Carborundum; I hope so), and Dottlinger dropped the whole idea the same day. (Morning I saved, but incidentally loosed two more idiots on the world. One later made it to Leavenworth anyway, but the other went straight. Two out of three will get a fellow out of the Sally League any season.) Morning acted his part with mock sadness, I with mock humility; but he spoke to me again.

  Football practice began the next week, Capt. Saunders came back the next, and we slogged on through the tail end of the rainy season, crazy about down-field blocks, gang-tackling, and mud.

  * * *

  It all seems important now, and there was so much more… a great football season, an undefeated team with Morning at quarterback and me running the defense, backing the line. A really fine season, a wonderful time, but I’m not sure what it might mean to you. Our last game — we had won the base championship the game before — we were quite drunk. Morning’s passes faltered and tumbled like wounded ducks, and my defensive signals were at best unintelligible and more often confusing. During the last quarter we alternated between an eleven-man line and an eleven-man secondary. When first presented with an eleven-man secondary, the opposing quarterback left the field in disgust. But none of it mattered. Receivers — stretcher-bearers, I assume — appeared under Morning’s sick passes; there was little need for defense since the other team not only couldn’t hold the ball, they couldn’t walk. The disgusted quarterback tripped on his way off the field; his receivers dropped seven passes in the end zone in the first half. And we couldn’t do a thing wrong. Even I scored a touchdown on a two-yard plunge that Morning arranged for me. It was my first and really a thrill, except that I plunged through the end zone into the goal posts which shattered my shoulder pads and fractured my collar bone.

  So I spent New Year’s Eve 1962 in Baguio in a cast. I should have never let Morning call that play. I had to drink left-handed. Morning found a bar, The New Hollywood Star Bar. It was a real place because there was no icebox for the beer, no one put money in the jukebox but lifted the face and punched the songs they wanted, and the other patrons were Communists, students, and gold-miners, representing the labor and radical wings of the party. Morning played Trotsky to their Stalin and Mao, and they loved it. No one spoke to me because Morning told them I was a major when I was gone to the latrine the first night. Morning also fell in love at The New Hollywood Star Bar. The girl was real too, a short, stocky Benguet girl; young, pleasantly plump, with a square face and square hands and fingers, and best of all (as Morning told me seventy-two times that night) dirty fingernails. He had visions of sleeping with her in a tiny nipa hut, surrounded by jungle, washed by rain, devoured by her muscular body. But she wouldn’t go the first night, and on the second she had cleaned her fingernails and wanted lady’s drinks and a trip to the Club on John Hay. The first night she drank beer from heavy glasses, drank like a man with dirty fingernails. The second night he argued louder and longer with the Communists, and I had visions of fighting our way out, but nothing came of it. Later, in our room at the Club over a bottle of Dewar’s he insisted that I tell him about my wife. Insisted in that drunken, persistent, arrogant way he had; his fist clenched except for the forefinger, which he held up with his thumb. “You need to talk about it, Krummel. You need to.” He kept it up until I threatened to bust him even with one arm tied around me. He believed me, though, and let it go. But the next day he blew up at Cagle (who was a hell-and-back-again better golfer) on the golf course, and Cagle took after him with a four wood. Morning was stunned for a second, but then leapt down the fairway, Cagle two steps behind, and Novotny two steps behind him, leaving me collapsed in laughter on the tee and three very amazed caddies watching it all. Novotny caught Cagle and disarmed him, and while he sat on him, Morning apologized so contritely, so humbly that Cagle began to laugh, and when they came back up the fairway we were together again. They finished the eighteen holes in the rain as I tried to keep my cast from getting wet, all of us convinced that we were the four greatest guys alive. Then we feasted on two-inch thick sirloins, and drank cognac in our room until we were disgustingly maudlin, stupidly drunk, and God-ever-so happy; blind drunk and lost. We stood at the edge of the bluff in front of the Club in a windy, wet night, staring at the lights far down in the valley, looking up at the clouds so close. Wet and in the wind we were almost cold, chilled for the first time in months, and we savored it, warmed ourselves with cognac; but already in the wind, in the waning rain, came word of the long, hot dry season, a hint of dust, a touch of fear.

  There is so much to tell, so much…

  6

  Raid

  The morning the Huk bandits tried to rob the Central Exchange, my trick was on the last of a set of mids. The six mids had seemed like six months to me. It had been too hot too long. The work had long lost any magic for me. Even Town was too dreary to bear. Hot and dusty and dry. The manure dropping from calesa ponies raised small dust storms in the street, and the wet cakes dried before they could stink. It had been five months since Lt. Dottlinger had tried to take Town away from us, but we would have given it to him now.

  At 0200 I telephoned the Flight Line, hoping that we had received courier mail on the 0100 flight from Travis, but there was nothing. I crossed a flying trip to the Flight Line with Cagle bulling the three-quarter all over the road from my list of possibilities to make the rest of the trick bearable. I wandered around the room several times, checking copy sheets, half-hoping Morning would start an argument or a word game or anything to pass the time. All the men were jabbering about the Trick’s Break trip to the beach at Dagupan planned for the next three days, but I had heard about nothing else for the past week, and didn’t want to hear any more. Back at my desk I wrote the 0300 entry in the log — something nonsensical, hoping for a laugh when it was read, but knowing no one ever read the damned thing anyway. The room and all its contents seemed to be turning gray. All the equipment, desks, chairs and consoles were already gray, and the faded green fatigues could have been gray in another light, and the cream walls were surely a shade of ashes. The same talk, the same faces. Without windows who could know if it was day or night outside? I might have been trapped in that square one-room building for months, even years, and not know it. The same work, the same non-work.

  I sat down and allowed myself to enjoy the idea of soldiering again — usually I didn’t think about it. I could have almost been excited about spit-shining my footgear, or laying out a full field inspection for myself. But I had my houseboy for those things, and no real reason to do them anyway. No more were the three fingers of my right hand stained soft and brown like those of the Negro shineboy in my home town. (Boy? Old Luke was sixty when I was ten. Morning must strain in his grave when I say that.) No longer the pleasant order of a perfect bunk, or me in khaki stiff armor and standing tall. But like most men, I fell easily into the easy life. Luxury is like a Sunday afternoon nap: “Oh, I meant to, ah…” but you are already dead for an hour or two, and you always wake with a filthy taste in your mouth. But you, and I, will sleep again next Sunday. If they took your houseboy away, Krummel, you’d cry like a baby. Besides, soldiering is for brutes and animals who don’t understand, and you, Krummel, are an educated, sensitive and intelligent man, and…

  A face appeared before me. Distraction, I shout! But who would it be but Peterson with a tale about a new girl at the Skylight, a real honest-to-God blond named Gloria who was an ex-movie star from Manila. He thought he might shack steady with her since she was the best thing eighteen years of life had found him. Or was it nineteen?

  “Sure, Pete, I fucked her once. Her hair’s bleached, she uses too much make-up to cover small-pox scars, and she gave a guy a bl
ow-job in a blue movie once. Lovely girl,” I shouted above the electronic whispering and the grinding of the damned malfunctioning air conditioner. Voices stopped, heads turned. Peterson, poorest son of Peter, frowned slightly and spoke to his friendly trick chief, “Geez. I thought she was a nice girl, Sarge,” then quietly dissolved into a film of ashes. I swung out of my chair and up the ladder to the roof before I got soot in my eye. “Geez,” he said behind me.

  On the roof I slammed the trap door on the noisy square of light. Novotny turned from his post at the edge of the roof. I waved at him, and he turned around to lean on the waist-high wall which outlined the roof. The compound was as bright as a supermarket, vastly illuminated by new floodlights on poles around the fence and on the corners of the building. It seemed very sheltered in the dark square of the roof, a safe place to stroll, to watch the world without being seen; the only sounds a scattering of gravel across the tarred roof from your feet or a gentle thump as a rice bug discovered its fate against the brick wall below the beckoning lights. A pleasant and roomy crow’s nest but with very little to spy upon — the spying went on below. The fences, the gate, the parked three-quarter, and fifty yards of cogon grass. Occasionally a small pig might be glimpsed racing across the thirty-yard swath cut around the fence, but where the grass wasn’t cut, it waved higher than a man’s hopes and anything you chose to see out there was a ghost of your own construction. A patch of darkness in a square of light in an eternity of darkness in a hole in the bottom of the sea. To the right in the distance were the lights of the Main Gate, to the left those of the Central Exchange, and behind were the dancing colored lights of the runways, dipping to the swinging baton of the endless beacon. But these were only lights, distant cold dots without the warmth of stars. The sullen night was no more pleasing than the eternal daylight below. Even the silence held a gritty whisper, and I walked around to hear the track of my boots and spoke for the sound of my voice, “Got a cigarette, Novotny?”

  He shook his pack at me, scattering several across the roof. “Have some,” he said. I could see the light gleaming off his cheeks and knew they were clenched in a grin.

  “Thanks.”

  “You got a bug up your ass tonight?” he asked as we searched for the lost cigarettes. “Heard you holler all the way up here.”

  “Maybe I’m going Asiatic like the rest of you bastards. Who knows?”

  “Told you this place wasn’t home.”

  “You did, didn’t you? Pete thinks it is.”

  “Huh.”

  “Pete’s fallen in love with a new broad at the Skyview. Do you know who she is? He said she had blond hair.”

  “Yeah,” he snorted, “she’s got blond hair, but she ain’t got pink nipples. She’s okay in the dark, but in the daylight she’s bad news.” We stood up and leaned over the wall.

  “He says he may steady shack with it,” I said, flipping my cigarette among the pile of rice bugs on the sidewalk below. “Hope he doesn’t bite off…”

  An explosion and a clatter of automatic fire at the Main Gate interrupted me. We could see bouncing headlights and splashing bursts of automatic fire followed by their rattle.

  “Jesus. What’s happening?” Novotny asked quietly, grabbing my arm.

  “I don’t know, but load your weapon, anyway,” I answered on my way to the trap door.

  Later I learned that six jeeps of Huk bandits had hit the Main Gate with everything from a 20mm cannon stolen from a jet to a .25 caliber Nambu light machine left by the Japanese, and lots of swivel-mounted .50s and .30s. And they knew how to use them. They came through the gate without changing gears, knocked down six Air Policemen, two Filipino guards and a KP coming to work early; blew up the guard shack, a jeep and a three-quarter, and kept on moving. But we did not know any of this until later.

  I hit the floor shouting, “Shut her down! Shut her down! Levenson! get on the phone to PMO and find out what’s happening at the Main Gate!” I fielded seventy questions by not answering, then caught seventy more when I unlocked the weapons rack and the ammo locker. “Everybody get a weapon and ammo and get on the roof!” They stared at me with a single question furrowing every face: War? Then the same sadness touched every pair of eyes when the next thought followed, as had been promised since they were born: The Bomb? Oh, my God, the faces said, Oh my God! Nobody told us. We’re not ready. There’s too much left undone. We all stood very still for a long, long second, very quiet in the metallic hum and beep of our useless equipment, as if wondering why it hadn’t warned us, listening again for a clue from the silent, glowing and smug tubes. I thought they would be all right. They were just stunned by the opening of the ammunition locker. None of them had ever seen the green footlocker opened. The weapons’ rack was okay, even familiar, an ordinary thing of day to day inspections or alerts, but live ammunition was only for the range or standing roof guard and being very careful not to accidently fire a round because old Johnson had caught a Special Court for firing one round. But this was different. Frightening, exciting, but mainly different, and it grabbed them and held them silent and still. But like all captured moments, this one was as short as it was long, and it ended as I shoved several bandoleers of M-1 clips into Morning’s stomach, and shouted, “On the roof! Move! Move! Move! Cagle, get the outside lights. Move!”

  They moved.

  I grabbed a rifle, some ammo and swung up the ladder, shouting once more for Levenson to call PMO. “Busy! Busy! Busy!” he screamed back, his voice as high and irritated as the signal he was getting.

  On the roof madness was unleashed as everyone tried to load, look, and run around knocking each other off the roof. A line of headlights had already turned off the main highway on the side road coming toward us. I could barely keep my mind on the men: the rifle in my hands kept begging to be fired. Another jeep followed the line at a distance which I later judged to be the effective range plus one hundred of a .50 caliber at night from the back of a speeding vehicle. Two sets of headlights were coming across the grass from the runways behind us, and more along the fence next to the Exchange. It looked as if we were being attacked from all sides, and since I had forgotten about the money in the Exchange half a mile east of us, this attacking fear did more than I could with all my pushing and shouting to make the men stay in one place. Peterson still stood in the center of the roof, lost, holding an M-l in one hand, a carbine in the other, and he looked doubly helpless because it was obvious he was not about to turn loose of either rifle long enough to get both hands on one. Novotny led him to the wall, and sat him down behind it. Collins, Quinn and Morning were kneeling behind the wall and at least had their weapons pointed in the general direction of the lights stringing swiftly closer. Levenson popped through the trap door and screamed, “A holdup! A holdup! A Huk holdup!” He giggled and ran to the wall loading a carbine. One of the jeeps from the runaway patrol swept through our lights, an AP hanging out of either side, shouting and shooting, one with a .38 revolver, the other with a shotgun, at the jeeps over a thousand yards away. They were having a grand time. Once more my rifle pleaded to be fired.

  Suddenly the floodlights went out, fading quickly away, and the headlights and muzzle flashes leapt closer out of the blinking darkness. “Where was Moses when the lights went out?” Morning said. I could not see him now, but I remembered how he looked a moment before, cold in his poise and readiness. “Down in the cellar with his shirttail out,” he answered himself. He sounded drunk, but I knew he wasn’t. Until I saw him at the wall, a faint question had been tickling the back of my neck. But now I knew he would fight as the lights and firing came on us like a squall line:

  Cagle came up, shut away the last bit of light, and said, “Hey, Slag-baby, you boys didn’t leave me a gun.”

  “Little fart don’t need one,” Novotny said beside me.

  “Pete’s got two.”

  Cagle shuffled to the wall. “Gimme one, you stingy bastard.”

  “What now?” everyone asked in one way or another — exc
ept Morning.

  What could I answer? Me with my trembling fingers knocking on the hard wood stock and me with a fine quiver in my guts and the blood in my ears like thunder…

  “Shit. Shoot the bastards.”

  No one cheered, but they listened quietly as I did all that Hollywood crap about firing on my signal and short bursts, and made a Jimmy Cagney joke about not shooting any AP dirty rats by mistake. I didn’t get any laughs either. A snort from Quinn, a few nervous shuffles, a slap or two at bugs, a muffled cough or prayer, then everyone was quiet, watching the racing lights.