One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  But he forgot, as best as Joe Morning ever forgot anything, during the heat of the next summer. He marched in Birmingham, sat-in in Tampa, sang all over the Southland, sang about freedom, and all the while bound by his love for violence, and every step closely watched by Richard. He had to grab Morning in Tampa when a skinny deputy spit his chaw on them, but he couldn’t have held Morning alone. Morning held part of himself, and he made it through the summer.

  In the fall he drifted to Phoenix with a chick he had worked with, and he lived off her and his guitar until January, then went back to the fund-raising scene. In San Francisco he stayed away from the club where he had seen the shimmering vision of Linda Charles, stayed away until he became conscious of his absence, then he went, sober, sweating, but she wasn’t playing there. Relieved, he went in to exorcise her (him), and found himself enjoying the show. It was funny, and did poke at the hypocrisy of middle-class America. And professional too, said the guy at the next table who said, and who looked the part, that he had just retired as a 49er defensive lineman. “These guys aren’t queer. They’re just actors trying to make a living. That one guy there,” he said, pointing to a slim stripper, “has got six kids out in San Mateo.” After the show he and Morning went down to Chinatown, drinking together until the ham-handed bear of a bastard made a clumsy pass at him. Morning swung on him, but the guy lowered his head, and Morning broke his hand. He ran like the wind, pulling over barstools behind him, and escaped with his life and virtue intact.

  The old doctor who set the bones that night gave Morning a long lecture on the vices of the world. “The devil wears many faces, son, many masks. Be forever on guard. Tempt him not for his strength is the strength of ten men,” he said, forming the cast with white hands connected to thin arms on which all the veins had collapsed from shooting. “Tempt him not. That will be twenty-seven fifty,” he said, but Morning ran out of the emergency room, shouting, “The devil wears many masks, old man,” diabolical laughter falling behind him as he ran. (Six months later he mailed a check to the old doctor, but the old doctor mailed it right back with a short note, “Son, I know what the devil costs. You’ll need this more than I.”)

  “Why do things always happen to me?” Morning asked Richard the next summer. “Why me?” and Richard answered, “They happen to all of us, man, so just stay cool.” But coolness wasn’t Morning’s long suit, so Richard refused to let him demonstrate. Morning, in anger, moved to a more militant organization, and on the first sit-in of the summer at a dime-store lunch counter in Birmingham, he laid low a nineteen-year-old kid who only said Pass the salt, niggerlover. Then the kid’s buddies moved in, and Morning left the civil-rights movement the same way he entered, swinging and kicking for holy hell.

  Charged with felonious assault, Morning faced one to three years, but his mother, faithful Southern mother, had a cousin (in the South one has cousins everywhere) who shot pool with the judge. So instead of three years, he was exiled from Alabama, in effect. The charges were indefinitely postponed, but the case would be reopened if he crossed into Alabama to demonstrate for anything ever.

  The anger he held for the judge’s sentencing, he held until he was outside. Once again he walked away from his mother without a word, stopped long enough for his guitar and a flight bag, then, anger still his only impulse, he walked from downtown, out 3rd, all the way to the city limits before he stuck out his thumb pointed toward Phoenix. But anger doesn’t lend itself to hitching rides: the action is too slow, the long waits while asphalt puffs in the sun and the sparse shade of a jackpine protects neither man nor angry beast against the hot, dusty winds trailing semi’s. The time after midnight, which may be the witching hour but ain’t the hitching hour, he stood at lonely crossroads, stood for hours that never end, then ran from side to side from road to road at the call of the headlights booming up through East Texas piney woods, hoping only for a ride to anywhere, and again the semi’s roaring past like fast freights. Then the afternoon sun like lava on rocky West Texas hills and a man makes the only shade there is, fatigue and dust and sunburn like a mask eating his face, until finally he hasn’t even a damn for the arrogant cars hissing past, slinging gravel at his hot feet. Then Phoenix rising in the heat waves as he watched from the back of a cotton-picker truck filled with Mexicans, and he was ready to lay his burden down.

  Four cold beers at his old girl’s place, then he fell into his first long sleep. He slept for days, thirteen to be exact, in her bed, rising only to relieve himself or swill a glass of tepid water. But not so much sleeping, he said, but dreaming of sleep and dreams. He ran dreams like movies with intermissions for a leak, then right back to the film — war, honor, love, the past, the future — running until it seemed his brain could contain no more images, yet still going on like a bad Italian movie. Frightened, the girl called a doctor who merely sedated Morning into real sleep for another twelve hours, then told the girl to throw a glass of cold water into his face the next morning. He came up angry again, and was all right.

  Back to the guitar and the bottle for a couple of months, then the music became enough. He sang professionally now, four thirty-minute sets six nights a week in a small sometimes coffee house sometimes bar, Harps on the Willows. He had never been better. More faithful to the box he played than the one he slept with, he barely noticed when she drove her small sports car back to Boston. But people were noticing him, and Morning never denied liking that. He played student gatherings on off-nights, then an occasional party at an English professor’s house. He grew a beard to go with his long hair, and was soon a minor rage among new rich, pseudo liberal, culture vultures in Phoenix, even out in simple, suburban Scottsdale, and there he met his fear face to mask, Linda Charles.

  * * *

  The party was at a large, rambling house on three acres of clipped, watered grass. It was an engineer’s house, filled with electrical gadgets, a button to flush, a button to roll off a neat amount of paper, ice makers, drink makers, and wired from asshole to elbow with sweet stereo. The floors were laid in rugs as thick as bear skin, and peopled with people fighting the way they made their money, the hesitantly liberal, the casual un-Godly who occasionally would quietly say “fuck” for special emphasis and quietly slap a fist into the other hand, and the women very careful not to blush. Morning came here, his credentials not much better than these who received him, came in a buckskin shirt stained with someone else’s sweat, scuffed cowboy boots, and faded, frayed Levi’s. He sang the soft protests, a few old English ballads (he could make me cry with even old hat “Barbara Allen”), then some wild bawdy Scotch songs, some popular comic snatches, then the dirtiest Irish roar he knew, and came on in the finale leading the group in “We Shall Overcome” like an intellectual cheerleader. He knew his audience. After him came the Twist as the crew-cuts and drizzle-heads paired off. He worked two sets, then a little mixing with the crowd, a few casual references to the Movement, and a crisp fifty from the hostess whom he had screwed in the English professor’s bathroom four times before she hired him. Out here, though, he made gentle verbal passes at all the pretty women, flowers caught in plastic paperweights, but he never followed them through. He knew his audience.

  But this particular night the Movement was moved out by a wonderful bit of risqué humor and singing by the hostess’ personal friend, the famous female impersonator, one Linda Charles.

  He remembered her (he couldn’t keep himself from thinking her instead of him) and saw her across the room, prim in a high-collared sleeveless black dress, sitting on a white sofa, alone because the men were afraid; and the women, either envious or unconcerned, stayed away too. The hostess led Morning across to her, introduced them, then fled. Morning shook her hand, trying not to examine it for any trace of male hardness, but finding none in spite of his failure. She said hello very softly, offered the seat next to her with a slim white arm. Morning hesitated, but she said, “Oh, hell, sit down. I may have balls but I don’t bite.” She laughed with such a sense of her own vanity an
d foolishness, such an ease, that Morning did sit, feeling it would be square not to, sat in the seat next to her, and all that was to come, with open innocent eyes.

  “You’re pretty good,” she said, “a professional, shall we say, phony. You didn’t get those hands as a passive resister, jack.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he answered, stupidly, not knowing what to say.

  “I beg your pardon,” she mocked, tilting her head with a musical hit to her voice. “You are a straight arrow square, aren’t you?”

  “I just didn’t know what you meant.”

  “You’re as much a fake as I am. Those old clothes, sweat stains, scuffs, and holes. I’ll bet you bathe every day and would rather die than wear dirty shorts. Your beard’s too neatly trimmed, too,” she said, but smiled quietly as if they were conspirators in the same plot. “You’re obviously as hip as Richard Nixon, but you’re good enough to fool these johns out here. Your father is probably an accountant and your mother sings in a church choir, and that’s where you learned to sing, in a damned church choir.”

  “Yeah,” he answered, “you’re right, but you’ve been talking to old bumble butt about me,” he said, pointing a thumb at the hostess.

  “Need to know what my competition is up to.”

  “You, too?” Morning said, amazement clear on his face.

  “She’s the kind of broad who says, ‘I want to experience everything in this world at least once before I die,’ never knowing she was stillborn. Of course me too. What do you think I’m doing here? Don’t be square forever.”

  “Well, I’m learning every minute,” Morning said, lighting her cigarette.

  “Really,” she said, leaning back on the couch and raising a delicate eyebrow behind a stream of smoke. “Then be a good boy and run get me a drink.”

  Morning started to rise, then slouched back and said, “Screw you, jack,” but said it with a grin.

  “Save your strength for bumble butt,” Linda said, smiling too. “I guess you are learning. Let’s go back to Phoenix and I’ll buy you a real drink to kill the taste of this cheap punch bumble butt calls booze.”

  Morning had just noticed fifteen or twenty heads turned in his direction, heads which turned back when he faced them, trying to conceal looks and smirks puckered in oatmeal faces. “What?” he said, turning back to Linda.

  “Don’t sweat it. If you read your Kinsey, or Ellis, or whoever, you know that true transvestites aren’t queer. I got problems, but not that one, man.” She spoke without hardness, without pushing, and a small verticle line pinched between her wide green eyes made her look discriminated against, told of being mistaken by narrow minds. “Besides,” she continued, a sad touch of a grin at her mouth, “it will be good paper for you. Raise your fee from what, fifty, to one bill for sure.”

  “For sure,” he said. “Let’s split.”

  “I know I’m lovely, but I’m not built that way, really,” she said, white teeth holding her lower lip off a smile.

  Morning laughed, then as he stood, he involuntarily offered his hand. She looked at it, her head cocked to the side like a puzzled puppy, he looked at it, then they chuckled together.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Sometimes I forget too.” She rose without his help, then walked toward the door, movements neat, trim, fluid, hip motion not exaggerated but terribly feminine.

  The son of a bitch practices, Morning thought, Jesus.

  Outside she offered to let him drive her XK-E. When he whistled at the metallic blue car gleaming under the desert moon, she said, “There are lots of burly chaps who are quite happy to pay a ten buck minimum to see some crazy cat in drag. Plus my mother left me about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, bless her drunken hide.”

  As he drove, Morning told her about his fight with the huge queer in San Francisco.

  “What a flaming queen he is, honey. He makes Mardi Gras every year so he can go in drag. What a riot. Smokey the Bear in hose and heels. Too much,” she said.

  They stopped at a quiet expensive lounge and drank at the leather covered bar for several hours, sipping slow Scotches, each seeming to wait for the other to get drunk. They discovered a mutual affection for Faulkner, then Sartre and Gide, particularly The Counterfeiters, then with wild laughter discovered that they were members in bad standing of the same national fraternity.

  “I’ve got this friend,” Morning said, thinking of Jack, “who’d love to meet you.” He laughed, then told her the long story about Jack.

  When Linda drove him home, they were laughing together like old buddies who had forgiven each other in advance, and when she drove away, her exhausts hammering the pavement as exhausts will, Morning chuckled with great relief. He had braved the darkness in its most attractive shape, for if she was nothing else, Linda Charles was a lovely woman with a wide handsome mouth and a clean laugh and the carriage and poise a woman needs, plus that touch of sad melodrama women break hearts with. And Morning had braved it, conquered it, and tonight he owned the world. He slept without dreams, woke without guilt, then in the middle of a yawn, remembered that he had left his guitar in Scottsdale.

  * * *

  He didn’t see Linda again for nearly a week, and then he didn’t talk to her. She came in the Harps with a group of white waving hands and flitting voices. Morning was in the middle of a set, and she nodded to him, then turned up her nose at her friends, laughing. Another time she came in alone, seemingly depressed, so Morning had a drink with her between sets. He made a few bad jokes which seemed to cheer her up, not from mirth, but from the effort. Then she came by his apartment one afternoon, her hair up, wearing a flashy red dress, looking like an expensive whore, and asked him to have a drink or two with her before he went to work. They went to the same lounge as the first night, sat at the back of the bar, and swilled Scotches like sailors. Within the hour they were quite drunk.

  “You know,” Morning said, grinning, “That’s the only thing you do like a man.”

  “What’s that?” She didn’t seem worried that she did anything like a man.

  “Drink. That’s all. You even move like a woman. Christ. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not a chick with a strange hang-up who likes to say she’s a man.”

  “No, man,” she said. “You ought to pay one month’s hormone bill, then you’d know I’m a man. But I know what you mean. Maybe I should’ve been a woman. Shit, I even had a breast tumor removed. They cut my little bitty nipple right out. But this way… Crap, I can’t lift anything heavier than a beer glass, I can’t go out in the sunlight, can’t even get drunk more than once or twice a month or my face starts getting hard.” She paused, circling the water ring on the bar with a perfectly done fingernail, then looked up and smiled a smile which, if it had come from a woman, would have broken a man’s heart. “Drag is a drag, man, more often than not.”

  Morning, a drunk man, an indiscriminate man, a man more frightened than he knew, let his heart be touched. “Jesus Christ, man, what is a guy like you doing in a bag like this.”

  “Good as any other in this stupid fucking world,” she answered, smiling slightly. “Good as any.”

  “Yeah, guess so,” he said, then laughed. “Shit, yes.”

  They drank silently for a few minutes, acknowledging each other’s sadness, but soon were scolding the darkened air with words again.

  * * *

  Later she began talking about herself, saying, “And as long as I’m careful about choosing my friends, neither too straight, nor too gay, I live the good life. The only thing,” she said, pausing, then looking directly into Morning’s eyes, “The only thing is that this is a dead-end bag. I’ve found a couple of chicks who thought they could make the permanent scene with me, but both of them finally asked me to drop out of drag, and I wouldn’t. Sometimes I even think about a family, oddly enough, but then I wonder what would happen if a kid of mine found out about me. I’m foul enough; no need to pass it on. I get enough ass off latent dikes; I’m beautiful; I’m happy.” She smile
d, happiness professionally touched with sad eyes.

  “That’s what counts, man,” Morning said.

  They drank, talked some more, then Morning realized that it was past time for his first set. Too drunk to sing, he called his boss, who said, I know your ass is downtown drunk with that naming queen of a bastard, and Morning said, My ass is here, yours is there, shove my guitar up it and smile. Thus went his job.

  When he went back to his stool, he found a slick middle-aged man who fancied himself a swinger sitting there, putting a big play out for Linda. Morning sat on the other side of her.

  “Kansas City, Kansas,” the traveling man was saying. “Sales. Regional director. Electronic bookkeeping equipment.” He then thrust out a hand at Morning, an aggressive hand, saying, “Howard Tingle. Electricity in that hand, boy,” then laughed, and squeezed Morning’s hand.

  Morning winced in mock pain, saying, “Hey, cat, lay off the hand, huh?”

  “Young fella like you ought to keep in shape, boy,” he said, slapping his gut. “Hard as a rock, all the way down,” he smirked. “Handball twice a week at home. Swim in motels on the road, but not always in the pool.” He laughed again. “You young kids shouldn’t let yourselves go like that.”

  “Yeah, man, I’ll take up toilet tilting tomorrow,” Morning said, but the salesman had already turned to Linda, whispering in her ear.

  She laughed, half-turned her head to wink at Morning, then seductively poked the john in the ribs. She led him on for nearly an hour, matching Morning drink to drink. The three of them moved to another bar, a place where Linda and the salesman could dance and cuddle in a booth. The salesman tried to kiss her on the dance floor, but Linda leaned back, coy as a high school girl, and shook a finger at him. Morning had to grin drunkenly at himself. After one song, she swept by the table for her purse, then pranced, hips thumping under the tight red satin, to the rest room, whispering over her shoulder to the salesman, “Now don’t you be a bad boy and try to peek.”