One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  * * *

  But Joe Morning is dead now, probably, unless the letter fell out of his pocket. Even if he isn’t dead, he is surely lost, and that makes me sad. I don’t know who to blame, I just don’t know who to blame.

  * * *

  When I left Oakland the day after Kennedy died, I drank my way across the Rockies and over to Nebraska. In a service station, the attendant-owner told me that the last owner had been killed by one of those crazy teen-agers in cheap store-bought cowboy boots who spawn in the heartland with nickel-plated .38s and thin excited girls hanging on their arms. The attendant-owner said business had been pretty good. Over in Iowa, I’m told, each spring when the rains fall like Noah’s flood, a farmer murders his family with an axe, then hangs himself in the barn like a side of beef. As I passed through Missouri, a man killed his dog, which isn’t notable, except that he had spent seven years teaching the dog to yodel. In Oklahoma, twenty-two migrant workers were killed when their truck plunged into the Washita River; passers-by picked their empty pockets before the highway patrol came. And in Dallas…

  * * *

  We’ve come a long way and the sadness is heavy. Gallard and Abigail finally married and are working for AID in South Vietnam. I saw them in Saigon last year, and though they both still loved me, I had been with the killing too long and made them nervous. Cagle and Novotny have both married, fathered children and prospered, but they both drink too much and talk about war when I see them. Saunders stepped on a mine in the Ia Drang Valley this last summer and died six weeks later at Walter Reed. Tetrick retired two years ago, early, and is drinking himself to death in Grand Island, Nebraska. He told me, when I last saw him, that Dottlinger was doing six to ten in Leavenworth for hot checks. I’m thirty-one years old and sleeping in my father’s house again, for now, and don’t know what to do, except echo Morning: It’s been tough, man, but I’m not crying, and it’s not, it’s for damn sure not, over yet.

  It is November again, and the gray wind and the rain weave at my window. The Mexican Pacific beaches are lovely this time of year, and I’m going there to rest, to drink a little, to eat the sun and dream Joe Morning’s dream for awhile. Then I’ll be back.

  About the Author

  James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and spent most of his childhood in south Texas. He served three years as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. Over the years, he has taught at the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Montana, and the University of Arkansas. Mr. Crumley, who summers in Missoula, Montana, has recently published The Mexican Tree Duck.