One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  “Not telling, huh? Maybe you don’t know either. By God, old Joe Morning knows. Knew. Generals, politicians, captains of industry want us here, he says. But you could have stayed in your rice paddy, and I could have stayed home. But you weren’t meant to be a rice farmer, nor I a college man. We’re here ‘cause we’re afraid, old man. Joe Morning didn’t know shit. That’s why he’s dead. I don’t know why you’re dead, but that’s why he is. He thought he knew. You ever meet him? Too bad, ‘cause he’s lying out there now, deader than shit, deader than shit…”

  But now I slept, my left arm cradling the old man, and I let my dreams tell him all I knew about Joe Morning, all I knew.

  * * *

  I woke in faint light, blinking in the shadows as a shaft of bright air fell across the open door. There were voices outside, Tetrick, Saunders, Dottlinger, making a KIA and damage report, and a loud throbbing of choppers as they lifted out the last of the wounded. The three came in the door, and I started to get up, but Dottlinger shot me before I could stand. The old man’s body had fallen across me and took two .30 carbine slugs for me, but one knocked my right arm back against the wall, and another slammed my right leg hard against the metal floor. Dottlinger saw, almost as he did it, who I was, and he dropped the carbine.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “You got the machine gun, Krummel; you’ll get the distinguished… you know… cross… something… commissioned in the field… I didn’t…”

  Tetrick and Saunders stood on either side of him, fatigue tugging at their faces. Tetrick cried. Saunders turned and knocked Dottlinger back out the door with the clipboard in his hand.

  Stunned, sleepy-drunk, but in no pain yet, I pushed the old man off me, and thought I would stand and salute. It seemed the perfect gesture, which is to say, what Joe Morning would have done, but as I shouted Attention! through the tears clogging my throat and tried to stand, the bone grated in my leg, and not the pain but the sound knocked me out with disgust…

  … and I woke here in this bed, determined to tell someone the truth. All this leading up to the truth. But it has taken too long. I find myself trapped by my own confession. The scene, the moment of extreme truth, swept past without me, the keys of my old machine clacking like knitting needles, and I without blade to cut the thread.

  Turn back, turn back, dear reader: “Then he ran into the midst of them, firing from the hip like a hero, but he hit at least three more before I swung my sights across his middle and blew out the base of his spine with three quick rounds, and he folded like a waiter giving a surly bow, folded, fell, lay still.”

  There it is. I killed Joe Morning. I shot Cock Robin. Rah, rah, rah.

  But you already suspected that, didn’t you? That’s all right. The whole purpose of any confession is to make the confessor, the guilty party, feel better. One whispers his crimes into the ear of a priest, or shouts them at his friends, or lends them to paper. Murderers tend to think they are poets; how distressing to discover that they were poets all along. It wasn’t guilt that made me hesitate to confess my murder of Joe Morning, but my vanity. I knew it would affect you if it seemed that I couldn’t bring myself to confess. Nonsense. I cared more when I killed him on paper than I did when I killed him for real. I also thought about letting him live. I wanted to kill him for a reason, rather than on a whim. No such luck, you say, He’s dead. Nonsense. He’s not dead at all.

  I’ve known for three days that the voice screaming down the hall belonged to my friendly enemy, Joseph Morning, but the momentum of the confession, once confided to paper, carried me on, leaving me in the rather absurd position of confessing to a murder that didn’t take place, yet. Art deceives as well as History; Life imitates Art as often as Art does Life; History seems to have little connection to either one. I can’t apologize for lying, for only an accident of timing kept my confession from being as true as I knew. Should I confess just intent, or should I admit only life-like confusion? Art, History, Life: traitorous knaves. Don’t blame me; I’m just their foolish pawn chained to my machine.

  That infinite number of monkeys somewhere out there pounding at their machines for an infinite time surely will re-create Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and me, but God knows if they’ll ever finish writing the truth.

  Please don’t despair because it’s not over at all.

  11

  Abigail Light

  I must admit that I was glad to see the bastard again. He lay, pale after the long still months in a Saigon hospital, immobilized like a huge turtle by a large cast from toes to chest, thinner, and somehow older, in his hospital bed.

  “Off your ass, soldier,” I said as I rolled into his room.

  “Krummel?” he asked, his head unable to turn to see me.

  “Joe, Joe, how are you?”

  “Bad, man,” he said. “Really bad. Crippled. Can’t walk, can’t get a hard-on, can’t do anything.” Tears seeped out of the corner of his eye, the one I could see.

  “They’ll fix you. Uncle Sam owes you that,” I said, trying to joke. I’d rather see him dead than crippled, I thought.

  “No, man. All the king’s whores and all the king’s men can’t put old Joe Morning back together again.” He forced a chuckle.

  “Cut it out,” I said. “This guy Gallard is a magician, man. Hell, he tied my leg back on, didn’t he? He’s all right. He’ll fix it up for you.”

  “There’s just nothing left to fix, Krummel. Nothing.”

  Nothing to say either, so I shut up for a while. Morning talked, but said nothing, and I wouldn’t have heard it if he had.

  “Well, guess I’ll take off, kid. Got a heavy date,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Krummel,” he said. “I need you to help me. You’ll help me, won’t you? Won’t you?”

  “Sure. You know I will.”

  “Get me… some sleeping pills or something like that,” he mumbled.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? I can’t stand this… crippled… bad scene, man… not for me… please…” he choked.

  “Ah, Christ,” I said. “To hell with you, Morning, just to hell with you. You’re the most melodramatic mother in the world.” I rolled away from the bed. “Please help me, Krummel, please,” I mocked. “I’m tempted, by God, I’m tempted, if only because you’re such a pain in the ass. You want to die, just rot then. To hell with you.” I turned the chair, knocked a pitcher off the nightstand, then moved out the door. “To hell with you.”

  I met Abigail in the hall outside.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “I thought we had a date.” In a brown, red, and gold tweed skirt and soft brown sweater with the sleeves pushed back around her elbows and loafers, she was as lovely as a fall coed in autumn. “What’s the matter?”

  “Wasting my time,” I said. “I knocked a pitcher off the table in Pfc Morning’s room. Would you pick it up for me?”

  “What were you doing in there? You know him?”

  “Old friends,” I said.

  She walked into Morning’s room, stayed longer than necessary, and when she came back, her sweet face was wrinkled in concern. Tiny white teeth chewed at her pale lips, and her hands held each other as if no one else had ever reached out for her.

  “He’s crying,” she said, walking behind my chair but not pushing it yet. “He wouldn’t answer me. He’s just crying. What did you do?”

  “I shot him,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.

  “Why is he crying?”

  “To hell with him,” I said. “He enjoys crying. He’s crazy about it. Leave him alone. He’s bad medicine. Stay away from him.” Once again she didn’t listen, but she did push the chair down the hall. “You’re lovely today, maiden.”

  “Huh?”

  I grabbed the spokes and turned the chair out of her hands. “Listen to me,” I said. “Is all of you going outside, or are you going to leave half of you in here?”

  She took the hand I gestured with, held it with both of hers. “I’m sorry,�
� she said. “But he looked so damned sad. Like a little boy whose dog was just run over. I felt so sorry for him.”

  “Yeah,” I grunted.

  “Yeah what?”

  “Yeah nothing.” I turned, pushed myself on toward the door.

  “All right, Billy Goat Gruff,” she whispered when she caught me. “Don’t bite the milk of human kindness.” She pushed me on out the door.

  We rolled downhill through the golf course, uphill around the Nineteenth Hole Clubhouse, along the bluff past the Main Club. I took off the blue convalescent pajama top, lay my head back, and let the sun work on me. I kept my eyes closed until we were past the Main Club and into a stand of timber going uphill again on a graveled footpath.

  “Where are we going, nurse? Physical therapy in your apartment?”

  “Just shut up and help me push.”

  As we topped the small ridge, we came out on a clearing, a bowl-like depression circled by the ridge. In the center a miniature Greek theater had been built by some bored but imaginative airman, but the rocks were rough-hewn and it recalled something more pagan, Stonehenge maybe. Terraces stepped up the sides of the amphitheater, alternating stone and flower beds, rough stone, exotic flowers, sensual pinks, lush purples, velvet reds and blues, and pure whites. Abigail pushed me down one of the walkways to the bottom of the bowl and stopped next to the stage.

  “You’re pretty heavy, fellow. I’m not sure I can get you out of here,” she said, wiping sweat from her forehead with a bare brown arm.

  “You mean we’re stranded here?”

  “You’re stranded here,” she said. “I’m not.” Then she laughed and ran away, circling the small stage once, then she flopped on the grass, then rolled on her back and stretched. “Isn’t it lovely.”

  “Gaudy as a goddamned Christmas tree,” I said.

  “Don’t be cute,” she said. “Admit you’re dizzy with beauty, you’re stunned with color, knocked out by the air, enchanted with the sky, and madly in love with me.”

  “It’s all right, I guess,” I said, smiling.

  “Quit that,” she said. “I mean it.” She sat up, propped her arms behind her, slipped her loafers off, and crossed her ankles. “You never admit anything,” she said, not smiling. “Just say it’s lovely. Just admit that much.”

  “It’s okay; if you like that sort of shit.”

  “It’s lovely. Admit that.”

  “Okay, so it’s lovely,” I said. “So what the hell. Gushing doesn’t make it any more lovely.”

  “I didn’t say gush,” she said, tilting her head back. (I would have cut my leg off just to kiss her neck just then.) “I just said be honest and not cute and not cynical and admit what is.”

  “Come off it, lady.”

  She looked up at me, pouting playfully. “Please.”

  “No.”

  She looked down and away, trying to hide a really pouting mouth, and in a small quiet voice asked again, “Please.”

  “You don’t give an inch,” I said.

  “Neither do you.” She rose, pulled the blanket from behind my back and, in a very methodical medical manner, spread the blanket. With a nurse’s hands, neutral, efficient, she helped me out of the chair and onto the blanket; then she sat in the chair, held her hands as a child does when she prays, and said, “What are you afraid of?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, nearly shouting. “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. I’m stunned and enchanted and dizzy, assaulted by beauty, the beast in me is soothed by sky and sun, appeased by flowers, beset by madness, etc.”

  She said nothing for almost a minute, then, once again between folded hands, “You didn’t say you loved me.”

  I started to shout, though what I never found out, but she giggled into her hands, stood up, fell beside me, kissed me, then lay her head on my chest.

  “You idiot,” I said, holding her against me. But I let her be silent too long.

  “You didn’t say you loved me, Jake,” she said, her words muffled against my chest.

  I waited, sighed familiarly, then said, “And I won’t say it either. I don’t believe in love, baby. I’ll like you, respect you, and cleave unto you all of my days, but I don’t believe in love. I told you that when this started.”

  “It didn’t matter then,” she whispered.

  “Why not?”

  She rolled over, kissed me again, then said, “I only loved you a little bit then. Now I want you to marry me.” She blushed, then moved away, and lay face down on the blanket.

  I went numb. “What in God’s name for?”

  “I knew when I saw your face in the sunshine. You need me; I want you. I get out in six months, and I want you to marry me.”

  “Just be quiet for a while, will you?”

  She closed her eyes, and I lay on my back watching the peaceful white clouds fluff the blue sky.

  * * *

  Abigail had been, in her early years, what is commonly known as a town punch, though she was never as promiscuous as she was thought to be — not virtue, but a lack of able candidates, she was able to laugh now. She admitted that she earned the title. Only daughter of a fat merry high school principal and a thin nervous English teacher with a love for Gothic romances, Abigail grew up torn between the castle of eighteenth century love and the battering ram of nineteenth century virtue. Her maidenhead had burst, of its own accord, when she was fifteen, and she slept with twenty or more boys before she was eighteen — dry, senseless pilferings in the back seats of cars. Her reputation followed her the twenty-eight miles down Route 6 from Marengo to Iowa City, and she fell into the sad pattern of repeating old mistakes, until she fell in love. A boy just out of the Navy three years after Korea, a drunk at twenty-two, dated her because her roommate was busy, and because he was more interested in drinking than fucking, and because she enjoyed the same thing he enjoyed, namely sitting by the Iowa River with an icebox full of beer. He found the shy lovely girl under the reputation. He drank less; she fucked not at all; love.

  She told him; he suggested that they refrain to refute her past. Three months of happiness, then in January he, drunk, stepped through an air hole in the ice covering the river; the body wasn’t found until spring.

  She said she spent her weekends parked up there, sitting in the car in the midst of crystal winter, cold blue snow and a pastel sky, cursing, cursing her sin and her untimely virtue. She had no shell to draw about her, but she made herself be careful. There had been a college boy, two pilots, a dentist, and nearly Gallard, but none of them had come to anything permanent.

  When she told me I should marry her, I couldn’t decide if the knot in my stomach was fear or love. I believe it was love, now, but I couldn’t decide then. My life had too many loose strings, and I thought I’d best be about the business of tying them without knotting them. And I didn’t believe in love or anything.

  * * *

  “Can you wait and not push?” I asked.

  “Not forever,” she said, looking up then moving beside me, “but for now.” She kissed me, her lips cool on my face, but in only an instant we flamed together.

  “Cut it out,” I said, “The cast’s in the way.”

  “Nonsense,” she said, and she was right.

  * * *

  Gallard came by late that night as I was making pencil corrections in the manuscript I had finished the night before.

  “Through with that?” he asked.

  “For now.”

  “May I see it. It was my idea, you remember,” he said.

  “How little you know, doctor,” I said, holding the pages to my chest.

  “You told Morning that I was a magician and that I would raise him from the dead. Obviously, you think I know a great deal.”

  “Will he get up from the dead?” I asked.

  “The spinal column was bruised and pinched, in layman’s terms, by a bullet sliver, but I fixed that. He’ll walk when he gets over feeling guilty. I understand that you helped that today. Do you know wh
at he is guilty of?”

  I laughed.

  “I thought you two were friends?” he said, puzzled.

  “Joe Morning is guilty of being guilty; he’s done nothing.”

  “Don’t make riddles,” he said, peeved.

  “That’s your game, huh? Here, take this mess. Everything I know about Morning is in here.” I handed him the manuscript. “I hesitate to let you read it; it tells about me, too, and I ain’t always pretty. You understand that I’ll deny the truth of it, if you try to do anything about it.”

  “I don’t understand at all.”

  “You will.”

  This was Joe Morning’s first day.

  * * *

  Gallard took my manuscript, notes, journal, whatever, then left for two weeks in Hong Kong. He put Morning in a neck-high cast, promising that he would walk after two weeks of total rest. He also, after seeing the condition of my cast, took my wheelchair away for two weeks, promising me a smaller cast and crutches in a fortnight. One day of mobility, one taste of Abigail, and chained once more. They also moved me from my room into a ward (where I shall remain until the end) and Abigail and I could talk but not touch; but most of our talk concerned messages from Morning to me.

  “He said tell you thanks,” she told me the next day.

  “Tell him he’s welcome,” I answered, slipping my hand down the side of the bed to clasp her thigh. She had arranged me with an empty bed on either side. Sharp girl.

  “But he also said that you would have to take him seriously someday,” she said, moving away from my hand, blushing, smiling. “You horny bastard. I’ll have you arrested.”

  “Don’t give them an excuse. They’ll lock me up forever if they get the chance.”

  She fluffed my pillow, trapping my hand between her belly and my bed. “From what Pfc Morning tells me, you should be. He says you’re a reactionary moralist at heart and that you believe in ghosts.”