One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  “Boy, oh boy, that is some woman,” he said, sitting across from Morning. Sweat beaded his forehead and he wiped at it with a cheap handkerchief, his face slack with whiskey. “Say, I’m not messing anything up for you, huh? Hate to do that,” he chortled, unbuttoning the blue collegiate blazer he affected.

  “Not a thing, man.”

  “God, she’s some broad.”

  “She’ll show you things you never dreamed of, man.”

  “I’ll show her something she’s always dreamed of,” he said, patting the lump in his crotch.

  “Go, baby, go.”

  Even in the dim light from the jukebox Morning could see the heavy coat of fresh lipstick gleaming like a wound on Linda’s mouth as she walked back to the table, a smile of anticipation curving across her face.

  “Let’s dance,” she commanded.

  They swayed close, slowly, and Morning saw Linda place a perfect lip print on the salesman’s rolled oxford collar, then the salesman was trying for her mouth again. She avoided him, laughing, teasing, until the end of the song when she turned away then quickly spun back, grabbed the salesman’s face, and kissed him long and hard, the muscles of her neck rippling like her tongue in his mouth, but she pulled away before he could raise his startled arms, and ran giggling back to the table. Morning didn’t answer her grin; he turned his face, then ashamed, turned back with a slight smile.

  The salesman stayed on the dance floor, stunned as if the red on his mouth came from a fist, but then he came at the table, lust ugly on his face. He cornered Linda like a dog after a bitch, clung to her mouth as if receiving life itself from her, his hands clutching at her arms, then running like crabs at her legs, up the smooth sand-colored hose, toward the the dark crevice. Morning saw what was coming, so he ran to the rest room.

  The water gushing in the sink as he washed his face didn’t cover the angry gasp, the curse, the mocking laughter, the knifing “what did you catch hold of there, john,” the quick stumbling across the dance floor, the hand stabbing at the door knob.

  But the salesman’s face wasn’t angry, just sadly confused, when he said to Morning, “She’s a goddamned man. Did you know that? A fucking man.” His shaking fingers gripped Morning’s denim jacket. “A man. Did you know that?”

  “That’s okay, man,” Morning said, pity twisting to contempt on his face, “I’m a woman.”

  The anger needed a second to travel from the salesman’s tired, drunk brain to his face, and then another to transfer to his arm. But the room was narrow, and his wild swing ended against the metal towel container, but his words got through:

  “You fucking queer bastard.”

  Morning’s knee and fist moved at the same instant; the knee, faster, found soft purchase first; the knuckles swept a red trail across the salesman’s blanched forehead. He fell back on the white toilet, his face framed by the pure white wall: his smeared, benumbed, moaning mouth; his eyes clenched as tight as his fist had been; the lip print perfect on his white shirt, gleaming like a deliberate clue left by a clever, romantic cat burglar at the scene of his crimes. Vomit bubbled at his shamed mouth as he hiccupped, then reeling to the side, he retched into the cavern of the urinal.

  Blind madness and rage hit Morning, and without thought, he slammed his fist against the side of the salesman’s face and neck, five, six, maybe seven times. His head rattled against the inside of the urinal like a marble in a cup, but wouldn’t bounce out, and when Morning left, he still moaned into the blood, piss, and whiskey; a small moan, no louder than the trickle of water dripping down the drain of the urinal, but it had the same determined futile patience of the trickle, determined to wash the waste of man away, and the same futility too.

  * * *

  Linda had the Jag running when Morning walked outside. She had scrubbed the smeared make-up from her face and let her hair down. She had good clear skin under the cosmetic mask, and under the street lights she could have passed for a sixteen-year-old virgin.

  “Bad?” she asked.

  “Bad,” he said.

  “Then maybe we should take a quick run up to Tahoe. I’ve got a place where we can lay up for a while. You have anything you can’t leave?” Without seeming to drive fast, she took the car quickly down to Indian School Road, then up on the Black Canyon Highway, north toward Flagstaff. “You have anything you can’t leave?” she asked again as she laid the car out up the expressway.

  A guitar, some records, a few books, but the landlord would hold them for back rent. “I don’t have anything anywhere that I can’t leave.” He paused, then said, “Hey, don’t pull, don’t pull that kind of shit around me again.”

  She turned her face, clean, fresh, soft in the muted glow from the dash, and from her scrubbed pink mouth: “Why the fuck not?” The exhaust followed them in the silence, a trailing echo chasing its source.

  “I don’t know. It was a bad scene. That cat was a turd, but I didn’t like beating up on him.” He refused to look at her, but her hair brushed past his face as she tossed her head.

  “Baby, remember that each time you laid one on him, you laid on a blow for freedom. When all the dumb shits like him are pounded into the sewers, then people like us can start to live, then everybody can live…” She went on for several miles, listing the sins of the American middle-class businessman, saying all the things Joe Morning had said so many times in the past two years. She found a bottle of Scotch under the seat and a stack of bennies in her purse, and she let him take the wheel at New River when they stopped for gas. By Flagstaff they were popped up and tight both, singing protests and laughing and crying. They shouted The Revolution is Coming to drunk Indians and sleepless Mexicans wandering the highway’s edge. On a lark they detoured through Grand Canyon, whipping past complacent, sleeping campers. They stopped to stand in the moonlight over the South Rim, feeling on their high the smallness of this tiny scratch in the earth. Linda softly sang Joan Baez ballads, and an occasional echo would drift back up on the wind out of the heart of the canyon. As they walked back to the car, she stopped; stuck out her hand, and said, “Joe Morning, you are a good cat.”

  Morning took the hand, saying, “You too,” but the thought whoever and whatever you are stuck in his throat.

  They raced on across the desert, that night, the next day, across rock and brown earth, through receding heat mirages to the green shade and cool, cool blue of Tahoe.

  * * *

  Morning spent the first three or four days worrying about living in the cabin near Meeks Bay with Linda, but she showed little interest in his sex life; he relaxed. The days were easy, cool from the first cold dip in the lake until the last brandy after dinner. They both read and slept most of the time or lay in the mountain sun until the salesman’s face faded from Morning’s dreams. There was a party down the beach one night the second week, and Morning found himself quickly smothered in Scotch and women. He drank, he fucked, he kissed, it seemed, a thousand women that night, and the next day, sleeping off the drunk, he dreamed that one of the women had been Linda, and then it was the salesman, kissing him, and then Linda and the salesman were clawing at each others crotches, and Morning was angry, until they began tearing at his clothes… and he woke.

  As he lifted his head off the bed, a sledge hammer crashed into his forehead. He reeled back, rolled off the bed, his eyes crossing and giggles tickling up his throat. Sitting on the floor, he giggled again, groaned, stood, then made a circling lunge toward the bathroom door, the bathroom between their bedrooms, the door he had always been so careful to lock, so careful to knock on, but this morning he slammed into it, thinking only of cold water splashing his hot, painful face.

  Linda stood, unstartled, before the mirror, obviously carefully preparing her face for something. “Hello, baby,” she said, smiling. “Come on in,” she said.

  But now it wasn’t easy to think of her as Linda. She had tied her hair back with a blue velvet ribbon, and she had almost finished with her face, except for one small false eyelash whi
ch she still held expectantly in her hand. This made her face seem slightly unbalanced, but it was still a lovely woman’s face, but only the face. Below ran a bare, somewhat thin, white hairless chest without even a budding titty to break the line. There was one male retarded mockery of a nipple, but a stretched diagonal scar supplanted the other. Linda’s chest seemed to be winking conspiratorily at him, and Morning giggled again. And then his eyes dropped below the bare chest and the naked waist, and he laughed out loud. A huge throbbing erection cast its vote for some kind of masculinity, raised a one-armed salute to the world, as if to say, Whatever he is up there, I’m by God a man. Morning doubled with laughter.

  “You mother-fucking straight son of a bitch, don’t you laugh,” Linda screamed, her voice more like a woman’s than ever before. And Morning didn’t pause. “Stop it!” she screamed again. “Stop it!” But Morning couldn’t stop.

  He laughed as if he hadn’t for years. There was, no more than there naturally is, no malice in his mirth. He even expected Linda to join him, but she stomped her foot, shook her head as if it were weighted with a heavy witch doctor’s mask, and screamed, “Stop it! I’ll kill you! Stop it!” Then she slapped him. She slapped him with both hands, flying at him like a little dog, her fine mouth curled in hate. Morning stumbled out of the bathroom and fell back across his bed, still roaring, rolled off, and felt his head bounce off the night table, then heard the sea-like roar of oncoming unconsciousness. The last thing he remembered was a rather bony white foot with tiny red toenails swinging at his head, but he couldn’t get his hand up to stop it.

  * * *

  Morning felt, though he couldn’t think why, that he had been asleep for a long, long time, leaving his brain groggy and stupid with sleep, a troubled sleep too, a heavy bond holding him, sticky, smelling as sweet as taffy. Waking took time. More unconscious than alert, he rolled to his stomach, pushed up to his knees, then stood, and for the second time in two days, though he thought it the same day, he fell toward that bathroom door. Leaning heavily on the sink, he threw up a dribble of clear liquid, then he rinsed his mouth, drank, then immediately threw the cold water from stomach to sink. He rinsed his mouth again. Then he raised his head, not to look in the mirror, but merely to hold his head up for a change, and in the silvered glass was reflected the ghost, the face which haunted him into the Army, across the sea, his own face.

  (We all see things we can’t face at one time or another; even I once ran as Joe Morning ran from that image. Picture, if you can, a gargantuan draft horse ripped in half by lightning from a summer shower, then a boy that afternoon racing on a bareback pony to see the destruction and finding the front quarters and head moving and jerking and grunting, and his horse shying away in the mud, then the boy advancing with a thick live oak branch, afraid to run, for he had never known running, his code allowed no running room, stepping up to the heaving carcass and swinging his cudgel against the withers with that mad terror named courage. The carcass convulsed. A three-hundred pound sow backed out of the cavern she had gnawed into the rank flesh, entrails and lights draped from her shoulders, congealed blood and flesh dripping from her grunting mouth. A jaded sneer wrinkled her nose and she was ready to fight for her pounds of flesh. I ran; she followed me in spirit. My grandfather spoke of pigs rooting among the corpses between the trenches; I couldn’t stand that.)

  The visage in the mirror wasn’t exactly Morning’s. His neatly clipped beard was gone, and his face, it seemed, with it. Pancake foundation lay thick on his cheeks. An angry red slash gaped open in mockery of his mouth. Dark, blue-shadowed, lined, amazed eyes glared under drooping mink lashes. A long blond wig, sensuously mussed, hung to his shoulders. The hand that touched his face sported teardrop nails of blood red. His body became aware of the rustle of a white nylon nightgown, a cotton stuffed bra pinching his chest, his crotch feeling naked in panties, and stockings encasing his legs. Even the hair on his chest and legs had been shaved. He dried his face carefully, then walked about the cabin looking for Linda. Her things were still there, but she was gone. He did find seven color Polaroid pictures of himself in various stages of being dressed, but the eighth picture wasn’t there. He looked among the empty sacks and boxes on the bedroom floor, but the picture wasn’t there either. Price tags and cash receipts were though, and he calmly marveled at the price of perversion. Then he went to the kitchen and fixed breakfast.

  After breakfast, he noticed that his lipstick was faded. He went to Linda’s room and fixed it, then turned on the TV, opened a bottle of champagne, and drank a toast to himself: “Why not? Why the fuck not?”

  * * *

  “Well, why not?” I asked as dawn fled in the windows of the hotel, then I laughed.

  “What are you laughing about?” he said. “It wasn’t funny.”

  “Why not? You were drunk; drunks play games. Laugh and it ain’t so serious; don’t laugh and it’s trouble,” I said.

  “I can’t laugh about it. I’m still scared.” He hung his head, all the way down to the table.

  “Of being queer?”

  “What else?”

  “Oh, hell, come off it. You were used, taken, then you played a child’s game coming down from trouble. That’s all.” I said.

  “Three days ain’t a game,” he said. “Three days in drag.”

  “Three days, three months. It’s all the same. If you were queer, or any queerer than the rest of us are naturally, you would have already fallen.”

  “You think I subconsciously knew that broad tonight was a Billy Boy, don’t you?” he said into his folded arms.

  “Christ, get off that shit. You want to be queer, jack, be queer. You want to be straight, be straight. But quit bugging the world about it.” I stood up, rubbing my face.

  “Always Krummel with the easy answer.”

  “It is easy. Just say what you want to do, then make yourself do it.” I walked to the window. Manila Bay seemed filled with mud that morning.

  “Maybe easy for you, but not easy for people with feeling, sensitive people.”

  “That’s cute, boy. You’re just too sensitive to live. Well, jump out the goddamn window. If you will excuse the metaphor, Morning, you are a pain in the ass sometimes.”

  “That’s because that’s the only place you got any feeling, fucker,” he said, looking up. “You’re the one who might as well be dead.”

  “Yeah, it’s tough all over.” I walked to the bathroom to shower, and when I came out, he was gone. “May God watch out for the innocents,” I said to the empty room. I caught the next bus back to Angeles, knowing that the next time I saw Morning, he would be hating me again. I knew too much about him. But then I always had.

  9

  Preparation

  Let me warn you now. Three days, then out of this damnable traction rigging. The warrior’s necessity: Mobility, in the form of a wheel chair.

  Gallard said: A wheel chair, fool, not a chariot, not a tank, not a war horse, but a wheel chair.

  We do with what we can.

  “No drinking,” he said, “no fighting with the nurses. Understand.”

  “I always understand.”

  “You never understand,” he said. “Don’t drive it off the bluff.”

  “Don’t drive what off the bluff,” Abigail said, walking into the already crowded room, a childish grin bright on her face, her hands clasped behind her.

  “Watch him,” Gallard greeted her.

  “Yes, watch me, wench. I get wheels.”

  “Rolling to hell,” he said.

  “My home,” I said.

  “Man’s fate?” he asked.

  “Destiny is a kinder word.”

  “Fate is death. Destiny is life. You’ve got them confused,” he replied.

  “God confused them, not me.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Abigail asked.

  “Nothing,” Gallard said, “Krummel’s fly is down again, and his death wish is exposed.” He smiled, but he couldn’t meet my eyes.

/>   “Impossible. You’ve got it in traction.”

  “I wish I could,” he said, walking out. “I’ve got more idiots to repair, more fodder to rearm.”

  Abigail turned back to me, a question cocking one blond eyebrow, a question she was afraid to ask. She slipped a pale pink rose from behind her. “An offering, sire,” she said, then curtsied.

  “Thorny,” I said. “A warning.”

  “A promise.”

  “Thank you,” I said reaching for her hand.

  “Three days, my liege, then I wheel you away to my flower castle.” She kissed my hand. “Three days. But now I must hurry to prepare another room for another knight back from the crusades, a crippled knight from the Holy Land.” She kissed my hand again, then bit the base of my thumb. “Three days…”

  “Hey,” I said, stopping her at the door. “You’re as silly as I am.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Don’t you just love it.” And then she was gone.

  In three days, free, free of bed and burden, for then my confession will be over, the tale concluded, and the judgment will begin. I will be glad, I think, to be finished. To think about it makes me smile…

  But even as I write these lines, a scream spears down the hall, holding my hands from the machine. Then words, slurred with pain and drugs: “Please, God, let me die.” Then a closing door muffles the cries.

  My guilt seems so petty next to that cry. I bear only the guilt of Joe Morning, but that voice bears the world.