One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  “He didn’t mean anything,” Abigail interjected.

  “That’s just his way of telling her he likes her,” Morning said.

  “You could have fooled me,” I said, but let it go at that.

  Morning rolled over to the other tables to make peace, but he stayed longer than necessary.

  “What’s he up to?” I asked Abigail, but the throbbing music covered her answer.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, louder now. “Trying to get out of the Army, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “You know he’s more of a dead-end than even I was?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe you were right awhile ago. I don’t know. I’m just sorry. I’ve always wanted too much; now I have lost everthing. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” I said. “I thought I was going to ask you to marry me tonight.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, so we drank on through swirling smoke and music, silence our only bond.

  * * *

  The hospital began processing my papers one day, then suddenly I had just two weeks left in the Philippines. I was alone now; little to do but drink more in the evenings and limp around nine holes of golf in the mornings and lift weights in the afternoons. Morning still feigned his paralysis, Abigail, her love, and me, indifference. I lifted three hours every afternoon now, hefting weights like a longshoreman on overtime, poisonous sweat squeezed out by the expanding, bursting, exploding muscle cells. My body grew quickly hard again, competent, hard, ready; my limp disappeared. On a quick overnight pass to Manila, I had a fake Swiss passport made, got a Mexican and a South African visa, and called my father to tell him to sell my share of the Santa Gertrudis herd. He didn’t ask me why, but he did say he wished I wouldn’t. I said I wished I didn’t have to. The name on the passport was Robert Jordon; it was a joke; nobody laughed.

  Gallard gave another drinking bout, promising to behave if I would. Morning stayed sober longer this time, and he and Gallard argued about the Chinese Communists while Abigail got drunk and I stayed drunkenly sober. When Gallard and Morning walked and rolled to the Main Club for another bottle of gin, together so they could continue the argument, Abigail asked why everyone was ignoring her. I kissed her slack mouth, and said I wasn’t. I fucked her on the bamboo couch before she had a chance to protest while one of the maids peeked around the corner of the porch. Abigail, afterward, said I wasn’t very nice. I said I wasn’t a boy scout, if that was what she meant. Then I fucked the Filipino maid on the kitchen floor while Abigail cried in the doorway. I didn’t get any merit badges. When Gallard and Morning came back, I had both maids and Abigail naked in Gallard’s big bed. Although Morning had to act crippled, we all jazzed and drank until daylight, then slept until five o’clock. Morning and Abigail argued over breakfast, and it was over between them. She called me a bastard as she left and threw a plate at me; but she missed. Morning and Gallard drank some more, but I followed Abigail home. The next day, I lifted twice, morning and afternoon.

  * * *

  When I had four days left, Morning asked me downtown for a farewell drink. I waited until we were in The New Hollywood Star Bar again before I asked him why farewell drinks now when I had four days left.

  “Man,” he said, “there has been so much shit between us, and so much good stuff too, that somehow I want to get it straight before I leave.”

  “No,” I said, then pulled on a beer, “before I leave.”

  He drank, then said nothing. One of the students opened the face of the jukebox, punched some songs, then wandered back to the bar. Marty Robbins came on singing “El Paso” on a scratchy old record, obviously around since the late fifties. When he groaned about “a deep burning pain in my side,” Morning nodded, but still kept silent.

  When the song finished dying, he said, “No, man, it’s me who’s leaving first.” He waved for more beer. It came, room temperature from a case behind the bar, timid white heads poking over the tops.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I guess if I can’t trust you, man, I can’t trust anybody.” He looked up very seriously. “I’m joining the Huks.”

  “So am I,” I said, trying to smile.

  “Don’t joke. I’m not.”

  “Oh, shit, Morning, get off my ass.” But I knew by the sickness in my guts that he wouldn’t.

  “Man, I know you don’t think that the world is worth saving, and in a way, I agree, but I have to do something, I have to try. And this is the only way for me. I can’t go back and march in peaceful parades and sing about freedom, man. I can’t help register voters for elections that I think are meaningless. I can’t work in the slums because I want to tell the people to arm, to burn the fucking country down, to screw the New Frontier and get what they can. Get their guns and run for the hills. But it isn’t time for that yet. America is hopeless, and I don’t know that this is going to be any better, but it is what I am going to do.

  “Man, it is going to take fire for the world to start over again. People have to learn, property has to burn, blood has to run… that’s all.”

  “Peace through war,” I said.

  “That doesn’t sound like you.” He had stopped trying to convince me that he was going because he knew he was, and he had stopped trying to convince me that he was right because he didn’t care. “Shit, man, you taught me about war and about doing what you think is right, so I’m doing it.”

  “I never said anything about joining the Huks.”

  “You didn’t have to,” he said, taking off his glasses. He cleaned them slowly, then handed them to me. “There. I only need them to read, really, and I’m through with that, with reading and talking and thinking, I’m tired of all that. Give them to Gallard and tell him I’m sorry.”

  “Well, no sweat,” I said, drinking and shaking it off, “they probably won’t take you.”

  “They’ve already taken me. That’s funny. Remember that old man you talked to at the wedding down at Blue Beach. He is a Huk. Sometimes you’re pretty smart, Krummel, sometimes. Anyway, they’ll use me as a pack-mule till they are convinced, and I will convince them.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I sighed, “but I wonder how long you’ll last.”

  “Long enough.”

  “Yeah. Think about this. You’re not a soldier, Morning. Maybe you’re tough and smart, but you don’t know anything, you haven’t…”

  “I know as much as you knew,” he interrupted.

  I had to smile. “Maybe so. Shit, I don’t know. I just hate to see you go.”

  “No other way for us,” he said.

  “What about your folks?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

  I stood, then wandered to the latrine, peed, wondering how I might stop him, but when I went back to the table, he was gone, the phony wheelchair sitting empty, his glasses gleaming from the tabletop. There was nothing to say. For an instant I wished that he had died in Vietnam, but I knew I didn’t. I sat for a moment in the wheelchair, slipped on his glasses, and drank his beer, but it just didn’t fit, so I drank my own.

  * * *

  Two, maybe three hours passed, and I thought nothing, said nothing, and drank very little. The Filipino, the student with the dirty mouth walked up to me, and in not an unfriendly voice said “Hello.”

  I hit him in the mouth and he tumbled backwards into the latrine.

  I sat and the music and talk went on for perhaps fifteen seconds, then stopped. I took an easy drink of beer and when the student nearest behind me swung at the back of my head, I ducked, and elbowed him in the ribs. You could hear them break like a bow snapping. He lay on the floor, out of it, and I moved into the corner by the jukebox. There were seven of them, but only two miners, and they were all moving toward me, but I wasn’t waiting.

  I went for the nearest miner, catching half a dozen punches on my head and shoulders as I went. I had my neck tucked inside my chest
and I wasn’t waiting. I blocked the miner’s roundhouse with a left and his foot with my knee, then hit him in the throat. As he went down, a wave of bodies hit my back, but I rolled as I fell, and came up with my back to the door. The other miner came first and I took two good shots to the forehead before I grabbed his arm and swung him out the door. He rolled over the hood of a car (and a taxi ran over his arm and the driver went for the police).

  The bodies again flew at my back and forced me to the wall, but my foot came down on a shin with the edge of my shoe and I caught an inquisitive nose with the back of my head and smashed it like a tomato, and I rolled out again.

  They had me in the middle now, swinging, kicking. I missed with a right, hit the top of a lowered head, and felt the bones give way. Kick one inside the thigh, miss another’s kneecap, and fall under their hands and shoes. I know I was down and up at least twice, because I remember, and then there was just reeling darkness and spinning lights and sunbursts and darkness. Once, crouched against the bar, I felt broken glass under my hands and knees and wondered why it wasn’t cutting. Then someone kicked my head against the bar and the black whirlwind fire blew again.

  * * *

  I came back as the sirens approached, but when I stood, the room tilted and I stumbled across the room to the far wall, then rolled back to the bar. The barroom looked like hell, furniture splintered, blood, glass, a tooth shining in a puddle of beer, an empty shoe under a broken table… I closed my eyes, reeled again, then opened them. I felt my face: nose, somehow, intact; a lump as big as my nose on my right cheek; a gap in my lip up through my moustache for my tongue to tiddle; teeth, traditionally strong, still there, but loose; another lump with the skin split across it like a splintered mirror; lumps on my head. Second and third knuckle of the right hand pushed halfway back to the wrist. Half an inch of my left ear disconnected from my head. Flesh on palms and knees sliced. Blood all over. In the mirror behind the bar, I looked as if I had already bled to death, but I was alive, and able to walk now.

  As I walked behind the bar, the two girls scooted around the other end and out the door like flushed quail. I opened a beer, poured it in my mouth, then over my head. For some reason I looked around the room for Morning and wondered why he wasn’t there, then wondered why I was. And as the police and APs came in the door, the hurting began.

  * * *

  Gallard and Abigail cried and cursed as they repaired me, but I merely sat and endured. The words I spoke were to ask Gallard to knock me out for a while. I didn’t tell them about Morning; I didn’t know about Morning.

  So there it is.

  I told them about Morning the next afternoon, sitting on Gallard’s porch watching the shadows leap over the ridges, down the valley, over the ridges, across the sky, just trying to tell them about Morning as moths as pasty as powdered sugar and one butterfly as big as my swollen, bandaged hand and black as dried blood contest the border between day and night; moths out too early, butterfly out too late, white moths, daemons of the night, butterfly black as day, and Joe Morning gone… perhaps if he had known that I shot him… but then perhaps not, too.

  * * *

  The morning of November 3, 1963. As I waited for my plane to Clark I noticed in the Stars & Stripes that the Diem’s had been overthrown and killed by a junta of Vietnamese generals. Let shit eat shit, I said.

  As I walked out to the small transport a little ceremony was being performed for a casketed body also going down to Clark. A tanned airman held a flag and another played a casual taps as the coffin was loaded by a fork-lift. A high wind came across the mountains, and the flag crackled against the high blue sky, and the wind clipped the sad notes right out of the horn. I thought he might be another Vietnam casualty, but it turned out that his steady shack has stabbed him with a pair of scissors. I kissed Abigail goodbye, hugged Gallard, and threw Morning’s glasses in a butt can. There will be nights, I thought as I climbed on the plane, but no more mornings now, just windy afternoons and nights…

  * * *

  And so I flew back home, across the sea, more hopeful than Morning, less hopeful than ever before.

  The day after I was discharged at Oakland, John Fitzgerald Kennedy died from an assassin’s bullet in Dallas. It took me two months to get home. This was no way for things to end, no ending I could handle, and I carried Joe Morning on my back across the breadth of America, until finally a cold wind blew me home again.

  A Most Personal

  Epilogue

  And that same wind has blown where it might, Africa, Southeast Asia, and around for three years since and Morning has been with me all the days, but the manuscript has been gathering dust through that time till now. After he came back to life, I couldn’t go on. I’m back home now, recovering from wounds again, just back, from Laos and the CIA, and this letter came last week.

  * * *

  Well, old war horse, I’ve written pretty often in the past year or so, but haven’t had much chance to mail a letter. The postal service out here isn’t so great.

  It’s been tough. I know you told me it would be, and I believed you, but you were right, I didn’t know.

  It’s not the fighting, not at all, in fact I look forward to a fire-fight now days, and I see them often now days too. The army is right behind us all the time now and it is only a matter of time. That phrase works in lots of ways — time weighs more than the base plate of a mortar or five hundred rounds of belted thirty caliber ammo. You didn’t tell me about all the time I would spend sitting on my ass under a banana tree, you didn’t tell me lots of things…

  I’m hard now, man, hard. In spite of the food, I’ve filled out; got my growth, as you’d say. I steal vitamins whenever I can and, though I can’t laugh about it, I know that you do, laugh at the picture of the great revolutionary dashing through the jungles with a bottle of One-a-Day brand vitamins in his pocket. I’m as brown as a gook now, but I’m not one, and they remind me every day. They kept all the shit for me, cooking, washing dishes, until I busted one up who asked me to wipe his ass. God, they’re nearly all as dumb as old Dottlinger. They’d rather collect taxes from poor gooks like themselves than rob American bases. They’re shit. I guess I’m shit too now. Three days ago I gut-shot an old man who spit on me. He sat in the sun for a long time with his guts in his arms, till I shot him, not out of compassion but out of disgust. Hard.

  But somehow easier too. I wish you’d go see my parents, man, tell them that I’m sorry, that I love them (at least the memory of them), and that if I could find a way, I would come home. Don’t tell them I’m dead.

  But then the hardness is back. I guess you’ll get this while teaching at some fat-ass girls’ college in the North. The army has been on our tails for four months and I haven’t slept much and haven’t eaten much and I think maybe I’ve killed a thousand men and I don’t even know why. I haven’t eaten beef since I saw you last, haven’t had many beers, and don’t even know why. I’m not crying, man, because I did what I thought was right, I did it, while most men sit on their fat asses not even caring about right, and though I’m hungry and I’ve got sores all over my legs and my left arm doesn’t work too well since I caught a bullet last May, I know I’m a man now. I don’t worry about that. I’m only sorry that there wasn’t an easier way.

  There isn’t much else to say. I just wanted you to know that I loved you, old horse, and that I was a fool. I’m not crying, man, but it’s been tough, and I won’t be sorry when it is over.

  Your friend,

  Joe Morning

  A note came with the letter, saying that this American had said that I might send one hundred American dollars to the person who sent this letter to me. I didn’t do it.

  * * *

  I’m glad I was in bed when the letter came, though I’m not glad to be in bed again. God, the images rush back. Morning running for the latrine with his ass bobbing white in Dottlinger’s face, the mutiny, crying over the dead Huk he wouldn’t spit on six months later. And the things he told me.
Fighting on the university lawn, fighting in Birmingham, fighting. But the picture that hangs with me: Morning roaring out of that van on Hill 527, desperate, romantic, mad with hate, sick with hate, breaking the back of the attack with one fine last gesture, so fine, so fatal that it seems a shame he didn’t die there while he still believed in his hate, seems a shame. But he didn’t. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how he died, but I’m sure it was dirty and painful and impossible to bear, and I’m certain he bore it well.

  * * *

  It has been tough all over, though. After I drank my way back to Texas after my discharge, after I dried out for a few weeks, after I lost Ell again, I did go to Africa, silly as it may sound, but I met a CIA man in Johannesburg before I could hire out. I told him, when he offered me a job over two warm beers, that I didn’t care who I killed for, just so the pay was good and the action often. He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t contradict me either. They sent me through Special Forces training at Bragg, then to language school at Monterrey, then to northern Thailand. An Army major and I slipped into Laos, periodically, to train Meo tribes to resist invasion from the north. Unfortunately we couldn’t train them not to sell us out to the North Vietnamese regulars operating along the edge of the Plain of Jars. They must have believed in capitalism, because three different times the major and I ran out of one end of a burning Montagnard village as the North Vietnamese hardhats ran in the other. The third time the major didn’t make it and I took a teacup full of shrapnel in my ass then ran three miles, mostly downhill, to the airstrip. And now I’m home again, on my ass, wondering how it all happened, how it will end, why it always happens to me…

  But that’s Morning’s line, isn’t it, not mine, but then his letter, sadly, sounded more like me than him…

  The mortar round would have killed me this time but for an old Meo woman who stumbled as I ran past, faltered and took the steel meant for me. Pieces of her flesh stuck to the back of my shirt and when I found them on the U-10 flying out, I threw up. The pilot bitched and I told what had happened and he said, “No sweat. Just a fucking old gook broad.” When we landed at the base camp back in Thailand, I broke his jaw with my rifle butt before he could get out and lost another government job.