One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  “My people came and took him and many wanted to torture him, and they tore one finger off and made him chew it a little bit before the leader stopped them. Then they chopped his head off with an axe. They said his mouth was still laughing when it hit the floor.” She rose and motioned us to the bar, showed us the three deep gashes in the wood and then made us put our fingers in the bullet scars in the wall.

  “An evil devil,” she said as we sat down, “and evil never dies. You know that. My people tried to burn this place, but a storm came and put the fire out.

  “Then one night about three months later a wind blew out all the candles upstairs and down. Before they could be lit again, a girl ran downstairs screaming, half-naked, with one breast cut off. She died of fright, and though they searched and searched the house for the breast, it was not found. Never.

  “And so the lights are never turned off,” she said, waving her delicate hand. “Never. And when a monsoon wind breaks the electricity, something bad happens. Always very bad.” She smiled as she finished the story as if it had rubbed her tired back. “So this is called The Haunted Whorehouse.”

  “A fine tale,” I said. “Beautiful.”

  “Oh, but it is not a tale. Go ask any of the girls.”

  I walked over to the giggling mingle of whores and asked the one with Novotny. The girl on Novotny’s lap flung her head up at me, quickly covered her breasts with her arms and in a child’s voice said, “Oh, but you must not talk of it for bad luck.”

  The world continued around me, the talk, the music, the dancing, Cagle squealing on the fat whore’s lap, but inside the needle-iced shell of my body, time stumbled long enough for the girl’s fear to be mine. The ghost was real.

  “I think I need a beer,” I said when back at our table.

  “I told you,” she said.

  “Joe, that kid was scared out of her mind. It was as bad as seeing the ghost myself.” I had always kept a silent fear of seeing a ghost. Not that I expected the spirits to harm me, but that fatal knowledge of seeing one would be fright enough. I looked too hard not to see one someday.

  “And now you’re scared shitless, too,” Morning sneered. “Man, you kill me, Krummel. A mystic reactionary frustrated hero. Man, you have to stop it with this ghost bit,” he said.

  “But that’s what makes history, ghosts,” I said.

  “Come off it. Forget about dead bastards and worry about live ones. You can’t help the dead ones, but you can sure as kill the living trying to satisfy all those ghosts of yours. Look at Germany. Man, there must be at least thirty thousand ghosts per square mile left over from just the Thirty Years’ War alone…”

  And as easily as that he and I began arguing again, fretting all ranges of human knowledge; both, I’m sure, doing our best to impress the nameless lady in black. But she didn’t play that way. Morning was expressing the usual liberal line that better environments make better people.

  “People make shit,” she said, “not the other way around.” She stepped right in, disparaging our philosophies, matching our educations with her life. Morning and I might have eight years of college between us and all sorts of misquoted quotes to use, but she had started life as a twelve-year-old whore and had not only gone up instead of down, but still could laugh about it. She was a tight, mercenary little thing: there were no, so to speak, “for love” pieces in her collection of girls, and the only gold she covered with her toughness was deposited in the bank in Manila. But she wasn’t too hard to laugh, to be capricious when the mood suited her, or even to be foolish if she wished. She had paid for this liberty, and as long as she could keep up the payments on her luxuries, she intended to enjoy the freedom. If Morning and I had lusted for her body at first, we ended loving her husky, mocking laughter. A new warmth rosed Morning’s face and I knew he, too, was enjoying the wonderful ache of having a woman to talk to. A piece of ass, even a good piece, was reasonably cheap in the Philippines but, ah, a man couldn’t buy conversation with an intelligent woman for love or money. (But why did she talk to us? Later she was to say because we acted as if we knew everything and she wanted to teach us better, and also because she had never seen two such good friends who hated each other so much.) She talked even more than Morning and I, which was going some. She shouted and slapped the table and gulped lustily at her beer, dismissed a long involved argument with a wave of her hand, and laughed with us and at us. Once she touched Morning’s cheek and the bastard blushed. Then he laughed at me when she tugged at one end of my moustache and said, “You’re not so mean. I could take you.” She made me remember the good things and I suppose it was my happiest night in a long while, wonderfully happy without violence — until David came.

  He called himself David and he wanted more than anything to have Teresita (she had slipped us her name for free during the laughter earlier). He had slept with her, but always for money, and never as often as he wished. David was twenty-four or five, tall for a Filipino, over six feet, slim and well built. Managing to forsake the slick-haired thin-moustached look of a petty Latin gangster, he kept his hair in a bushy crew cut, and except for the barong tagolog he wore, he might have been an airman from L.A. or San Antonio.

  “Hey, man, you cats cooling my chick for me?” he quipped as he swung up to the table. Teresita introduced us, explaining that David owned, or rather ran when his father was out of town, the only other respectable whorehouse in Dagupan.

  “Sure, man,” he laughed. “Just lay around and watch the bread make.”

  “You giving any free samples tonight?” Morning asked. “Or maybe it’s Happy Hour and I can get two for one, huh?”

  “Man, you’re putting me on. Like you have to keep ahead in this racket. Right, T-baby? And a little free tail can sure put a man behind, and though I’ll admit to like a little behind now and then, most the time I take my stuff straight.” David told us about all the Americans he knew and loved, and how he had worked as a yardboy at Subic Bay Navy Base a while after high school to get his English perfect, and how he was not like those ungrateful Filipino cats because he really loved Americans, and how that was the trouble with the PI, not being enough like the U.S. of A. where he was going someday. Morning stopped him right there to explain what a shithole America was, and how David would be treated like a Negro in many places, and how awful it was to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Teresita fell out of the conversation and began another game of solitaire while I watched.

  Morning and David dug all the manure in American life, then collaborated on a mythical black-market deal which would make them both rich (and ruin the Philippine economy), and then chatted about burning some grass if David could score. Teresita lost three games, and I drank two nearly uninterrupted beers. I understood by David’s quick dismissal of me and his patronizing references to my size that he thought me stupid and slow. I answered his questions in confused mumbles to help him think so even more. I didn’t like him; he was too cool, too friendly, too much. David thought that Morning was his competition. Not that he wasn’t, for at that point in the evening Teresita might have gone to bed with any one of the three of us purely out of bored exasperation, like an old bitch hounded into a corner by a pack of yapping, horny, squirting puppies will sometimes squat just a bit for one just to get shut of the pack.

  When the conversation died for lack of an easy connection, David suggested that we, good-natured, intelligent group of friends that we were, should run the pasteboards together. He wanted to play poker, but Teresita absolutely refused. The only game we all knew was Go Fishing, but no one could remember how to play it, so we settled on Hearts even though we had to teach Morning of all people as the game went along. Teresita had learned the game from another girl at the Cave; David had been taught, yes, by a Navy lieutenant’s wife at Subic; and I had learned the game at my father’s hairy knee.

  Not to brag, mainly because it isn’t worth boasting about, but I was and am a tough Hearts player, and I pinned David’s ears to his short-haired hea
d. Oh, I played sloppily, acted the fool, spilling my hand about, and being so amazed each time I dropped the queen of spades and thirteen bad points on David’s trick. “Har har har there Davey-boy. Guess ya caught the old bitch again, har har.” He caught on quick, but it didn’t help, and he lost his cool, stopped his incessant man-man-man routine, and started sweating. Twice he whispered to Teresita in Tagalog, but she answered with a shrug as if to say, “Maybe so. Maybe not.” The single time he managed to drop the queen on me, I said, “Well, ya got my butt that time, Davey-boy,” and then ran the rest of the tricks and put twenty-six bad ones on him. “Sons of bitches” he shouted, slapping the table; then whipping on his too-swift smile, said, “Oh, not you. These damned cards.” Teresita was completely indifferent to the whole game, and played as if it were just a game, though she knew that in some dead-end alley of the masculine mystique we were playing for her. Morning lost his love for David and sat on him a few times too. Teresita soon tired of both games, but not too quickly for David to think that he had been humiliated.

  She walked away to see to the bar or some other unnecessary thing, displaying her wares for the bidders one more time. The price rose right away. David said, “You’re a big guy. Want to arm wrestle? I’m just a little guy, but I’ll take you on.” I put him off longer than I really wanted to, but he kept pushing and Morning kept prodding, so I finally said okay.

  David was wiry and not lacking in flesh and muscle, and had probably beaten all the kids in town the same day he saw his first arm-wrestling match in a movie; but he was giving away forty or fifty pounds to me. I was fair enough at the game to be able to quietly, humbly boast that I had only been beaten once, and then by a professional football player, as long as I didn’t add that he was a halfback in the Canadian League. I had been held or nearly beaten several times by medium-sized wiry guys, and I understood how David beat Goliath: not only God, but the whole damned Christian world is always on the side of the little guy. It’s like never getting to play on your home field. So I worried. Everytime I happened into one of these things I would reassure myself that the world wouldn’t end, nor my life become meaningless, nor my pecker fall off, if I were beaten. I always told myself such and, of course, never believed it, but I should have realized that night in Dugupan that my instincts had been correct all along.

  I was ready, I thought, but not for the knife in David’s hand, a balisong, a blade with a split handle which folded over the two cutting edges, a sort of primitive switchblade. David opened his slowly as if it were an old friend in his hand, laid it edge-up on the table, and motioned to his two buddies sitting behind him who no one had noticed coming in. They looked like something out of an L.A. rat pack, and one was slipping another balisong from his pocket.

  “To make losing more fun, man,” David said with a sly grin on his face.

  “Not me, man,” I said. “I only play for marbles and match sticks.”

  “Sure, man,” he said, closing his blade and waving his troops away. I noticed that my troops had gathered, and wondered at all this fuss for a fuck. “Just putting you on, man.” Like hell.

  The knife had chilled me, had scared me in a way I didn’t like to admit, but it made me madder than hell, too. It was back in his pocket, but the challenge still gleamed in his arrogant smile, and his shadow lay flat and stark against the tabletop like an echoing slap. He reared his forearm on the table, strong and supple and slightly weaving in a hypnotic dance. I matched him to the murmur of a muffled “Get ‘em, Slag-baby,” to Haddad’s voice wailing like a street vendor as he took bets. I placed the brown of my arm, white against the brown of his, in the circle.

  “Let’s put a little bread on it, man,” he said, snapping his fingers. I shook my head, knowing as he knew: whoever lost, left.

  Our hands clasped, separate fingers carefully placed, molding a primeval bond. Morning held the hands as David and I eased into the clasp, then stepped back and shouted “Go!” No fancy stuff, no waiting, no more playing around, I leaned into his arm as if trying to shove him out of the universe.

  I should have known. What match was primitive cunning and arrogance against the enlightened rage of a civilized man? I should have known. White, paunchy middle-class American that I was, I was also the boy who had dug ten-thousand post holes before I was eighteen, milked twice that many cows, and lifted how many countless pounds in how many curious ways for the past ten years to retain that initial strength. Fed on eggs, fattened on steaks, nourished in the land of milk and oatmeal, was it any wonder I slammed a skinny Filipino’s hand to the table, ending with the same motion I began?

  Before the echoes of David’s hand on the wood stopped, I already felt silly, even guilty in the sudden quiet. He slowly flexed his hand, staring at the sliver of blood which split the middle knuckle. He grinned wildly and said, his bop-talk gone, his accent heavy, “We play your game, motherfucker, now we play mine.”

  He stood up, kicked his chair away, flipped the table from between us, and opened his balisong in a nickering, sickening twirl. The instance charged into my mind, clear and stark as if time tripped again. I saw everything with an incredible vision: the writhing crowd making room; Novotny’s aghast face; Teresita waving frantically at the bartender; an old whore already crying; Morning’s perplexity. All the figures as clear and distinct as if I had sculptured them, molded and cast the panorama of the stricken crowd. A crystal drop of sweat paused in its race down the side of David’s face. If I could have held that cleft in time, God knows what flaming stars, what nights of space I might have seen — but for fear. But I couldn’t have seen those things at all, for even as David moved, I stood as swiftly as he, and as his blade held the light, my chair already flew toward him.

  Ah, poor David. He might have sliced me into slivers, but he had no luck. The chair leg, four pieces of wrapped bamboo, slipped past his raised arm and slammed into his mouth. He staggered back with a surprised pinch around his eyes, as if he remembered all the movie chairs broken on virtuous backs, then he stumbled to the side as if the world were spinning too fast for his legs. He fell, then propped on his elbow, lay on his side still amazed. When he moved his hand from his face, he exposed a bloody gap where several teeth had been broken off at the gum line. The stubby root of one still gleamed optimistically in the cavity.

  This too was a clear picture out of the corner of my eye as I ran away, but I didn’t realize what it meant until I bumped into Morning standing like stone next to me. I turned back, no more thinking now than when I had run, and leapt toward David as he tried to get up. His blade scraped in his struggles like a rattler on the cement floor. I kicked him in the ribs, then stomped his hand, and scooted the knife away. Behind me I heard a crash as Morning and Novotny tore the legs off the table and cornered David’s rats without a fight. David was up now, and I caught his staggering rush, blocked his right, then grabbed his arm and spun him toward the bar. A clot of spectators kept him from hitting the bar, and he was quickly up. But in the short spin I had heard the singing and knew where my blood beat. When he came, I was ready.

  Did I cry? shout? suffer? I triumphed.

  * * *

  I panted over David and had an unbidden impulse from my boyhood to mount my foot on the bowed neck and wake the jungle with my call, and as the thought came and went unacted upon, I laughed away.

  Back I came at the touch of Teresita’s hand and the whisper of her voice, and found, on the far side of violence, desire coiled tight and hard about me. It’s violent we leave that place, I thought, grabbing her arm and pushing through the crowd, and fitting and proper violent go back. She did not struggle under my hand, then valiant hand.

  Once she slipped from my grasp in the scrambling people, but before I could reach back, she thrust up to me and I felt her swelling breast nibble at my arm. Across the floor and up the steps into the shadowed helter-skelter of rooms, our breaths breaking the air before us, we ran. At the first door I slapped the bamboo curtains aside and crashed into the room only
to find the bed already occupied. Cagle rode like a monkey on an elephant’s back among the acres of his bloated lover, humping away as if mere friction might consume the indifferent tons. Gripped in his saddle meant for no earthly horse, he rode, his hairy arms each wrapping a huge flabby breast, his tiny white ass flickering in the slitted light like that casual muscle it drove, while the unprotesting hulk calmly flipped the limp pages of a comic book above his burrowed head.

  Teresita and I laughed and laughed, but hurried to the room at the end of the slanting hall, our impatient hands flying at each other’s flesh like mad birds. She was naked and blood from a clumsy kiss ran sweet in our mouths before I could get my pants off; so I took her, damp and quivering, hobbled by my britches. She arched, bucked and achingly arched against me, reared like a mare in the chute, and the curve of her back embraced a void I must fill. And again she came from the bed, lunging up as if it were afire, and again she fell to earth, to earth and into the void beyond where our frail members hesitate to go; but I went with the proven strength of my back, swinging myself like a club, and I went like a child lost in a dark echoless cavern, and I went.

  And then we were easy and slow and rolling but not over, and her breasts quivered hot as tears on my face as we began the effortless lope through the foothills toward the snow on the mountains, blistering white snow in our sun. And as we ran, time fled past us like a startled bird, a beating, hurrying flutter, and the beard grew on my face and the drying mud of the jungle stiffened my clothes and the stench of the battle mingled with the steady slow suck of boots in muck. A web belt encircled my waist and a canteen thumped at my back and I knew my weapon lay under the bed, my rifle in frightened reach as I paused this moment from the fighting, this moment so precious between the fear, so perfect and beautiful because it might never be again, for I too must someday play the vanquished… But I had the smoothness of now, and clutched it as I felt the first bite of the snow as the cold, cold heat gathered to burst pure white re-creation, white and hot as the snows we trampled.