One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

You see, still other plots were brewing…

  Cagle, only an EM but silent and devious, had chanced upon a funeral procession the week before, a silent line of pallbearers, candle carriers, road guards, and the corpse laid out in a fine white lace shrouded coffin looking for all the world like a big giant birthday cake. He inquired of a professional candle carrier and discovered that the coffin had been rented from the local undertaker for a very small fee, considering the immoral beauty of the frilly pine box. This night he rented this lovely coffin without a word to a soul, and returned to the steps of Haddad’s place, ten holy candles in hand but no smile on his face, solemnly saying, “We must bury Joe Morning before morning; we must bury our dead before they stink.” We tittered, but he silenced us with a frown stolen from an assistant undertaker in Kansas City. And as the coffin was filled with the body, then shouldered in the dim light, we became as silent as mourners.

  And so we formed: pallbearers six, Quinn, Franklin, Levenson, Collins, Haddad, Peterson; road guards two, Novotny, Cagle; and one to count cadence, Krummel; the corpse we carried, Morning; tears in our eyes, pride on our drunken faces; fuck all the rest.

  We marched to the measured beat of a dirge, pagans bearing the fallen to his pyre, the coffin level with the pallbearers’ shoulders, candlelight and lace flickering in the night. It seemed for an instant, or longer perhaps, as we marched that we were as sad as if Joe Morning were really dead, as if we understood that he had been the best of us all, the most damned of us all, the most damned and the best. Step, pause, mourn Joe Morning, and move, solemn, silent, drunk, our homage paid. With each slow step the earth sank beneath us, tears plied our distant faces, and we knew no hope of resurrection, and tears plowed the dust of our faces. Lord knows where we might have ended that night, our sadness was that great. I headed us where I might, Cagle and Novotny stopping taxis and jeepnys and calesas at every corner, leading down dark rutted off-limits streets, past cribs where blankets separated the struggling pairs, past bars where card games stopped and beers paused between hand and mouth; into, into and through, the labyrinths of the market, among slabs of meat nailed by rusty hooks, where this morning’s fish became tonight’s garbage, through the darkness, and finally out at the blazing light of Chew Chi’s kiosk, jammed as it was to the walls with the 9th ASA, mourning things of their own.

  They poured out behind us, two hundred fifty strong. I picked up the beat to the usual 120, and the dirge became a roar, anger, mirth, carnival, death. My men sang, their grief gone:

  * * *

  We are Krummel’s raiders.

  We’re rapers of the night.

  We’re dirty sons a bitches.

  An’ we’d rather fuck than fight.

  * * *

  And the ASA was singing, to the tune of the old Western, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”:

  * * *

  Behind the door her father kept a shotgun,

  He kept it in the summer and the merry month of May.

  And when I asked her father why the shotgun,

  He said, “It’s for her lover, who’s in the ASA.

  * * *

  ASA! — Suck! suck!

  ASA! — Suck! suck!

  He said, “It’s for her lover,

  Who’s in the ASA!”

  Suck! Suck!

  * * *

  As you might remember, about fifty thousand Filipinos also called Town their home, though we often forgot. On Saturday night they would have expected it; on an ordinary night they would have been unhappy, but not too angry; on Good Friday, man, they went insane. The police switchboard, the Town switchboard, and the Base switchboard all jammed at once with irate calls and threats of international incidents and war. With the telephones down, the Air Police, using radios and intelligence, formed up with the Town fuzz, and came to do harm to us, racing toward the market with about forty jeeps, and six hundred sirens. It came to me that I was slightly out of place at the head of this mob, but it also came to me that I belonged here more than with the law, I was more my Trick’s man than the Army’s. So I gave the only order, they tell one in basic, which will stop a marching company in less than two steps: GAS!

  The troops dispersed, rats down holes of darkness, and when the law arrived, they found only innocent Joe Morning asleep in his coffin. The jeeps circled once like a band of raiding Comanch’, then sped after the shadows, but they were only shadows fleeing from their headlights. I, as an eyewitness, can categorically state that any damage, except to religious sensibilities or to shinbones fleeing through the night, was done by this marauding band of jeeps. There were four accidents within my hearing. A lone late arrival flying around a corner in the edge of the market clipped the side of the sari-sari store under which Novotny and I were hiding. The whole corner came off, the small building tilted, and Cagle rolled off the roof. He hit the ground running, and by the time the jeep turned around Cagle was singing, “Ho, ho, ho. You can’t catch me. I’m the Gingerbread Man!” and in a flash, he vaulted a fence and disappeared, leaving a bewildered AP behind him, shouting to an empty street, “Stop or I’ll shoot — I guess he got away.”

  Morning fared as well as any of us. The APs woke him in the coffin, asked him what the hell he was doing in a coffin, to which Morning answered, “I’m dead, you dumb fuck.” They wrote him up for conduct unbecoming a member of the armed forces. “For being dead and kidnapped by vandals, they give me an IR?” Morning said to a harried Dottlinger the next day. (Capt. Saunders had gone back to the States again.) Dottlinger took his pass for seven days, saying, “Lord, I don’t know what’s happening in this world. I just don’t know.” For the seven days without pass, Morning became a national hero. All over Base: “Hey, that guy there. He was the one in the coffin!”

  No one else was caught or connected with the march. Hardcore Townies just were not caught by Air Policemen, and we were all professional Townies. There was a period, shortly before the Huk raid, which I haven’t spoken about partly because it wasn’t really important and partly because I’m somewhat ashamed of my conduct during these few weeks. Cagle, Novotny, Morning, Quinn, Franklin, and I would sit in the market after curfew, drinking beer, daring the APs to come in and get us. They never touched us. In fact, I’m the original Gingerbread Man. I had to relax sometimes. Dottlinger gave me foul looks, and Tetrick commented, “You guys are all going to get killed someday, and I’m gonna laugh like hell,” but I’d learned from Morning how to play innocent too, so I did. The United States Government picked up the damage tab, as it should have: foreign affairs are strange and expensive adventures.

  Okay, so we desecrated a holy day, insulted the people’s religion, tore up the American image abroad, but what the hell; everyone already hated us when we got there. We ran with pimps and whores because nice Filipino families and their daughters spat at us on the street. Since we were not officers, we were scum, so we said to the world in general: suck. Suck to the good folks of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Kileen, Texas, Ayer, Massachusetts, Columbus, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, etc. You name it, baby, I’ve been there, and it ain’t good. Maybe soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, deserve the treatment they get. Maybe they’ve earned it. But soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, aren’t any worse than the people they have to deal with, and most of the time they have to deal with bastards. Morning, Novotny, Cagle, none of my guys, not even Quinn, were Ugly Americans. When they were told that they had to pay the price of all the bastards before them, they said, Shove it up your ass, jack; we didn’t make the world, baby, and we ain’t paying for no mistakes but our own. I know I’m sounding like Morning (what an admission), but there are a lot of people in the world who should be dead. Morning said Hitler had the right idea, but the wrong criteria. My hate isn’t as deep as his was, probably for good reason, but I almost agree with him.

  And, too, what we had done that night — and I say this without apology — affirmed, said, shouted that men, even the most ordinary of men, will sometimes, in
whatever way they can, refuse to be part of the system. In the defiance of that night, we bought back a bit of our individuality; shouted, as Quinn had shouted that night, “They can kill you, mother, but they can’t eat you!” Goddamn, Morning never learned that. He knew they were always going to eat him alive. I know they’ll never take me alive. Goddamn, goddamn, sometimes I miss him. Sometimes I do.

  But relief is never a moment away.

  * * *

  It was all downhill after Easter, we said, not knowing quite how we meant it. I grew fat, fatter, slimy and oily in the heat, sucking beer after beer, crying, it didn’t matter. And the money, too, down, down. In desperation I gathered a week’s leave to spend with Teresita in Dagupan on the beach, but we both caught colds the second day and squandered most of my leave in fever sweats, sneezes, halfhearted love, and stale, gamy sheets. To recover, we fled back to Manila on an air-conditioned train to spend two days and nights in a luxury hotel. That helped, but on the second afternoon I refused to give any of my quickly vanishing money to a ragged beggarboy. Terri and I stupidly fought, and the whole leave was lost in anger.

  Back to work. Air conditioning goes blink; major goes mad; repairman short circuits the whole Det, leaving the Head Moles to rage in sticky darkness, rage at me until I actually beat my head against a wall. At 1645 I left it in the hands of the next unfortunate, Sgt. Reid. He’d shucked his wife but hadn’t found happiness, and his face killed me each time he relieved me. Then evening chow was ham. We had ham, frozen ham just this side of rotten, eighteen times a week. That could be endured. But the nineteenth time busted it. “You must have miscounted,” the mess sergeant says. “Don’t make mistakes,” say I, handing him my plate. I sat in my quarters, the buttons on my khaki shirt straining to hold back the flood of beer gut jammed behind them. Sweat covered me, not running, but drifting like an oil slick. A Coke, I thought, I would have a Coke. Change in my pocket? No, only keys to doors behind me. Surely I had ten centavos somewhere. Less than a nickel. After fifteen minutes I came up with an old one, green with mis- and dis-use, lodged in the watch pocket of a pair of Town pants which stank like sin. Down to the Day Room like a kid after the ice-cream wagon in August. The damned machine (oh, foul machine, I ran astray of you before) took my last ten centavos silently, made no acknowledgment, gave me no cold Coke, made no apology, refused categorically to return my money. I hit the son of a bitch in the mouth. Bull-assed bastard of a machine. I shook the damned thing until Tetrick raced in from the Orderly Room to pull me off.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. I don’t believe I’d ever seen him concerned about me before.

  “Lay twenty on me till payday,” I said, and without a word he handed me two tens.

  The Trick carried me back from Town that night. The next noon I took the seven hundred out of the bank.

  Morning and I moved into the black market in high style, capital behind us, untold riches ahead. We bought cigarettes in the barracks for seven pesos a carton from the troops, made a run each break to Manila, carrying the cartons in the back of an AP’s 1948 Dodge, and sold the cartons of Chesterfields and Salems for eleven pesos. One hundred cartons, four hundred pesos, between $135 and $150 U.S. depending on how you changed it. We also carried twenty new stereo albums, which paid well too. We had several people on our payroll, buyers in other outfits, two APs, a Manila drop man, but we still cleared about one hundred dollars a break. I usually spent my fifty in Manila, as did Morning, but the seven hundred stayed in reserve. Ah, we lived well… but it didn’t help a thing.

  Krummel, fatter, meaner, more sullen each week. Morning, more anxious for violence, for change, for something. The Army, far from being the peaceful sanctuary I had sought, had become more complicated than civilian life. Black markets and beer, and love once again, of a sort, and the Vietnam rumors flying again. I began to hope, then chided myself for being a dumb drunken lifer just waiting for a war, but still I hoped.

  * * *

  One Break after a set of mids, Morning and I were half asleep after the beers we’d had on the drive down. It wasn’t quite noon, but it was hot as hell outside the hotel. I was waiting for him to go make the drop, deliver the two large suitcases sitting between the twin beds.

  “You going to make the drop, Joe?” I asked, feeling like a bad movie gangster.

  “You do it, man. It’s too hot outside,” he answered. We had been through this scene the last trip. I didn’t know what was bugging him, and he wouldn’t tell me.

  “I don’t know where to go. You know that,” I said, my eyes closed in the cool conditioned air.

  “Yeah, I know,” he mumbled. “I’ll tell you.”

  “That’s your part of the deal,” I said. “Remember.”

  “Well, why the fuck don’t you do something, you fat lazy bastard,” he said, only half in jest. “Swill beer like a pig all day.”

  I opened my eyes. He had sat up and now faced the windows, his sweat-stained back toward me. “What’s up?”

  “I’m just tired of doing all the work. Taking all the risks.”

  “I’m tired of you bitching all the time. I put up the money; you run the operation; that was our deal.” I sat up to open the last beer.

  “Krummel, you and your…” he said as he turned, “… commitment shit.

  “Well, fuck, take the last fucking beer, too, why don’t you?” he spat at me.

  “Eat shit,” I said, and left.

  * * *

  The Golden Cave, in spite of its name and reputation, was a rather ordinary looking place, a two-story house hidden behind a stucco wall in a residential section. The grounds were nice, and the large banyan trees kept the noise from disturbing the neighbors; best of all, though, were the girls and the central air conditioning; they commanded a price. It was run by a small sad man, an ex-priest, a homosexual who was writing a book which, he said, would give the homosexual a place in heaven, if not next to God, at least near the more compassionate Jesus Christ. I often drank with him while waiting for Terri to finish with a customer upstairs. He was good company, never pushy, and he ran a good, tight bar and whorehouse. But he was still unhappy about being disrobed by the Church. It seems he often used the confessional for more than a place to talk. He had knocked all the walls out of the lower floor. The low ceiling gave the place the intimacy of a home, the big room, the freedom of a house.

  Terri was having a drink at the tables back near the bar with a fat, somehow familiar man when I finally drank my way to the Cave that long afternoon. She saw that I was more than a bit drunk, and her eyes tried to wave me past the table, but I was in no mood to be waved off. I walked past, then peeled back behind her to put my hand on her neck. She smiled, frightened; her partner frowned, disturbed, and I answered both. She introduced him as a Mr. Alfrado Garcia, the owner of several bars and houses down by the stockyards in Pasay City, a section where a night on the town usually included waking up naked and half dead in one of the blood gutters the next morning. A big, fat man, his eyes almost in the back of his head, a greasy smile like a dimple in his face. Was I that fat already? I asked myself. Of course not.

  “Garcia,” I said. “A Spanish name, huh? You don’t look Spanish.”

  “I know we haven’t been introduced yet,” he said, ignoring my insult, “but I do know you.” His voice sounded like a sulphur bubble rising in a mud pit, or like cow shit falling on a hot rock, and his face contorted in a jolly fake of a smile.

  “Yeah,” I said, walking behind the bar for a beer, “I know you, too. Next time don’t bet against winners.” He was the guy who had dropped several thousand pesos against my thirteen straight passes at the Key Club back during the long Coke bottle restriction. Terri followed me, got two beers for them, and when her back was to Mr. Garcia, her mouth formed “No, Jake, baby.” I acted as if I hadn’t heard.

  “I usually don’t,” he said. “That’s why I’m rich today. I usually don’t. But perhaps if you had made one more pass… perhaps.”

  “But I didn�
��t. The wise man knows when to quit. It’s better to be wise than rich,” I said, sitting.

  “Exactly as I would have said,” he chuckled. “The wise know when they are beat.” He reached across the table to pat Terri’s right breast. “Yes.”

  I should have killed him then, but I said, “That’s not what I said.”

  “How is it that a sergeant can live so high?” he asked, the sick dimple sinking again between his fat cheeks. “Perhaps the black market? Now, I have some connections. One could eliminate the middle man. Chesterfields might bring twelve-fifty, perhaps thirteen pesos a carton. Something to think about.”

  “You can buy her, if you can, jack, but I’m not for sale,” I sneered. Terri flinched, but said nothing.

  “I didn’t mean…” he started.

  “We both know what you meant. What you pay for, fat man, I get for love.” Which wasn’t quite true, but it could have been.

  “He who loves a whore would sleep with his mother,” he said, calmly.

  I assumed he had a pistol in his back pocket under the baggy barong tagalog he wore.

  Heat forced its way from my guts to my neck, but I only said, “At least one who sleeps with his mother has one. One can’t sleep with a monkey, then call the offspring Garcia.”

  He tried to stand, but I pushed the table into him, then rolled it over him, and when he got his hands free from table and chairs tumbling on him and reached for his back, I kicked him in the stomach. His hands came back, but he tried to kick at me lying on his side. I kicked him on the inside of his thigh, then, when he moved his hands, kicked him in the stomach twice more, then leaned over to get the pistol. He waved a feeble punch at my head, but I chopped the inside of his arm, and he quit. I took the gun, an old pearl-handled .38 automatic, threw the bolt, chambering a round and cocking it. Terri stood out of the way, crying, saying, “No, Jake,” over and over. Holding the gun in my left hand, I stood over him until he tried to sit up, mumbling curses and threats. I chopped him above the ear. His jaw fell open on that side, and he stopped even trying to talk, but lay back down again.