One to Count Cadence (13 page)

I glowed. I sparkled. I felt heroic for a change, instead of dumb. (I’m not ashamed: pride has turned better heads than mine.) Someone understood.

“Ah ‘tis a kind voice I hear above me,” I said, but only a deep laugh answered me.

But by the time my hour was over I had lost that quick lift under the sun. The sun wasn’t merely in the sky, it was the sky. From horizon to zenith the heavens burned in my honor, and in my chest and back and head. And in the shattering light all clear things lost themselves. Colors faded into pale imitations of themselves and became dust.

I had come back to be alone, to find simplicity, and had found trouble, and in this trouble found I must fall back on that which I was, that which I would be, that which I had always tried not to be.

I am the eldest son of generations of eldest sons, the final moment of a proud descent of professional killers, warriors, men of strength whose only concern with virtue lay in personal honor. But I still misunderstood a bit that day, I still confused being a soldier with being a warrior. That small, mean part of me which had wanted to care about rank and security and privilege was dying, and with the death of order began the birth of something in me monstrous, ah, but so beautiful. My heritage called, and though it would be many long moons before I answered, the song had burst my cold, ordered heart and I hated in the ringing sweep of the sun, and I lived.

There are days, whole, long, lovely days in the mountains which have nothing to do with the sun. A thick damp fog drifts in, draping the peaks and the high valleys in eternal mourning, gray, misty mourning. The fog limits my view but increases my perspective (that is, I suppose, what limits are for), and though I can only see the two dripping pines and an occasional bird, I can hear the world on such days. Not that I stop staring out the windows; perhaps I hope to see a sound. On my own, of course; you know how I hate drugs. But the sounds, clean, sharp tones… they pierce the blanket. I am convinced (sadly so, according to Abigail, or perhaps she said madly; she tends toward an insecure mumble when she speaks) that the only reason I can’t hear watches ticking on golfers’ wrists is because of the pounding of their pulses as they stride confidently past the windows. I still live out those windows. They have become my connection with life, except for Lt. Abigail Light, because Capt. Gallard hasn’t spoken to me since the day of the incident with Lt. Hewitt.

But as much as I stare out those windows, I didn’t see Gallard creep up while I was reading the Sunday
Stars and Stripes.

“The present may be captured in those limp pages, my friend, but the past, and the future too, are out here, across this dim, gray, timeless mist,” a voice tolled in the window. I started, but caught only a glimpse of a golf cap, and wondered who the hell was playing tricks on a sick man. I should have known: a doctor.

In a few minutes the voice came again, disembodied, from the hall. “Yes, the past, dim, bloody past, my poor, mad fellow.” Gallard stepped in, wearing rumpled short pants, a knit shirt, crepe-soled canvas shoes, and a nifty new golfing cap. He looked half-pleased, as if he had just made a hole-in-one which no one saw, and a drowsy smile lifted the sagging skin along his jaw line. His face always seemed to me well-used: Whatever the expression, from grin to scowl, and whatever the extent of his emotion, his face had a wrinkle for it.

“Jesus shit. I thought I was having a visitation,” I said.

“You are, you are,” he chuckled, smiling still more. “May I come in?”

“Please do, kind spirit. I’d rather have you where I can keep an eye on you, than prowling around in the fog scaring hell out of me,” I answered, folding the paper. The pages were limp at that.

“It’s hell I’m scaring in, not out. Murder must pay.”

“On the installment plan?”

“Don’t read that crap,” he said, gesturing with a large thermos bottle from behind his back. “Isn’t it enough that you give life, limb and dignity to the Army? You don’t have to wipe your mind with their version of the news.” He took the paper out of my hands and tossed it into the trash can.

“Okay. What are you up to, besides collecting newspapers for Great Britain?”

He explained that he wouldn’t gather manure for the English, claiming that they were too hesitant about commiting their troops in World War II.

“Sorry,” I interrupted. “But why are you creeping about the clouds?”

“Well,” he said, paused, then got up to shut the door. “I was supposed to play golf with the Base Commander but, as you can well see, we were fogged out. So I’ve been at the Club, crying over a dozen vodka martinis with the old man. And since he gave me some good news about you, I thought you’d want to know. So here I am. Hate golf anyway. I’ll give you a drink if you promise to stay sane.” He poured two small ones out of the thermos. “Cheers?”

“Cheers?”

“You should be happier than that.” He seemed almost angry, and sailed his new cap into the trash.

“Why tell?”

“Because our leaders have decided not to send you to jail.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Well, mainly because I’ve managed, at great expense, to convince everyone from Lt. Hewitt to the Base Commander to an angry Air Police sergeant that you should be forgiven on the grounds of post-combat reaction or some other bit of jargon.

“We haven’t had so many Vietnam casualties that we’ve gotten casual about them yet, and since one of the ones we had died under rather suspicious circumstances — a drunken doctor and the wrong shot and all that sort of stuff. So everybody has a tinge of a guilty conscience right now which they will surely soon get over quickly…”

“Thanks. Who died?”

“Nobody you know. It’s always nobody nobody knows.” Gallard paused, his shoulders and chest, usually puffed in a knot of intense energy, seemed to be caving in upon themselves, sucked down in the wake of a sigh like a temple falling into the waves. “He wasn’t from your outfit. With the usual attempt at security, they scattered your outfit’s wounded like illegitimate children all over the Pacific. There are even, I hear, three guys in a British hospital in Singapore or someplace. Security, yes.”

“The bastards notified my old man that I was injured in an aircraft accident.”

“The security officer hasn’t gotten to you yet to swear you to silence; that’s why you have a private room. Less contact with uncleared personnel. Christ. Now everyone in the Far East knows about it.” He sighed again. “I had to make a deal, though.”

“What? What about?”

“Your court martial. As soon as you are marked fit for duty, as if you ever were, you will…”

“Get shipped back to Vietnam?” I interrupted.

“Don’t be silly. Of course not. A medical discharge will be drawn up, I’ll sign it; you get out, plus a twenty-five percent disability which you will lose at your first reexamination. So you get away free; like you always will, I suppose.”

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” His face brightened for a moment.

“I’ll tell you someday.”

“Please don’t.”

I didn’t quite know what to say; thank him or curse him. I didn’t even know what to think about him. His concern was obvious, even bordering on fascination… What was Marlowe’s line? “The fascination of the abomination — you know.” I understood it, even welcomed it as far as I understood it. An odd relationship, doctor to patient, savior to warrior, officer to man. But I never said “Sir” to him, not because of the friendship, but because it was unthinkable. His innate kindness, his curiosity, his love gently thrust him outside the officer, the uniform and made him a man, a man to whom I could say, “How about another drink?”, a man who would answer, “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice that you were empty.”

As he poured, I asked. “Why?”

“It’s seldom men know why they do things,” he said, then reflected a bit. How like him to know what I was asking. “Maybe because I hated to see anyone, even you, railroaded into Leavenworth.”

“Not much of a reason.”

“No, I guess not.” He sat his drink down, then dug into his hair and continued with a nervous chuckle, “And not even the real one either.”

I waited. I had time.

“You might say I did it because I used to dream about you when I was a child. Or have nightmares, I guess, would be more accurate.” His face drifted through a series of frowns and half-smiles as he leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands behind his neck.

“I suppose I’m obligated to be flattered or something, but I don’t really know what the hell you mean.”

“Oh, not you really. It’s a funny thing, a long story. You see, I’ve got this thing… ha! got… had this thing for World War I airplanes when I was a kid. I must have built thirty or forty models of them — it took ten tries to get one to fly; but it did finally fly. Perfectly. Nearly a quarter of a mile down the road to a neighbor’s place and made this perfect landing. I ran all the way with it. God, I ran. But it landed, as I said, perfectly, but in a hog pen, of course, and the damned hogs trampled it and chewed it and ate it, rubber bands and all.” He smiled to himself; he had forgotten about me. “God knows why. Maybe they liked the way the glue smelled or maybe they just didn’t care for their pen to be used as a landing strip. Who the hell knows? They ate it though, every bit of it, and all the while I was crying and throwing clods at them, but they just bounced off their fat, complacent rumps. I ran home and cried to my mother that it wasn’t fair, but she said that God didn’t promise that life would be fair, but that He would have mercy. Well, I said so much for a guy who doesn’t play fair, and that was the end of that.

“Where was I? Oh, yes. Anyway, in spite of God in heaven and pigs in the world, I kept building airplanes, tried some design modifications on the plans I got out of
Popular Mechanics,
even designed a few of my own,” he said with pride. “And when I hurt my hand, the worst pain came from not being able to work on the airplanes. And then I became so wrapped up, so obsessed, that I began to dream about them. Every night. Every time I closed my eyes I was in the cold, blue air over France in a Camel. God, I was a gay, rake-hell dog, too. Theatrical smudges of grease here and there, a scuffed leather jacket. But no scarf. I had better taste even then.” He laughed, then drank, perhaps dreaming of the thundering wind, the rainbow circling his biplane’s shadow as it leaped and ran and leaped again over the hedges.

“I, of course, was an ace at thirteen; but there was always a single dark cloud in my dreaming sky. Perhaps I’d learned something from the hogs. The cloud didn’t show up often, but often enough, and always so damned unexpectedly. I called him the Black Baron of Beirut, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten, but I think his name was Baron von Rumplested or something silly like that. He was always dropping out of the sun just after I had vanquished six Fokkers and wham! down I’d go in one of those awful falling dreams and then wake up in cold, heaving sweats. Not a dogfight, no contest, just wham! and down I’d go. He never bothered with finesse or fancy maneuvers or anything, he just swooped down and shot hell out of me. Once when my guns had jammed, he had the gall to pour sheep-dip all over me, and while I was trying to get it out of my eyes, he dropped the five gallon can on my right wing and broke it off.

“God, how I hated him. How glad I was when I exchanged the airplanes for women and the dreams ended. But I never forgot that face, that beaklike nose and that evil moustache drooping past the corners of his mouth. He was a dark German, an Asiatic German, not at all a warm, sunburnt Nordic German. His face looked like the word ‘Hun’ sounds, and his eyes always made me think of the Black Forest, even after I learned that it was in West Germany. And later when I was older and had a real war to deal with, when I found out it wasn’t anything except stupid and evil and cruel and without honor, his face became all that dark, primitive nature, that dark, throbbing blood, that fogged crossroads where evil meets beauty, and…” He stopped; perhaps at the crossroads he paused once again, then went on because he thought he knew the way.

“Guess I got carried away. But I haven’t talked about the dreams since the War, or even thought about them, and was glad to forget… until I saw your crazy, roaring eyes and mad face straining up at me as if I were the enemy, and I thought you were someone I knew. Then I realized you were the Baron’s son — no, the Baron himself, and so I… What the hell are you grinning about?” he asked, seeming half-angry. “What’s so damned funny?”

I told him.

* * *

Once upon a time (yes, once upon a time, for this too is a fairy tale as all history is, and it, even more like history, makes its truth not from fact but from belief and, yes, I do believe) near where the present borders of East and West Germany and Czechoslovakia share a common point, where the old boundaries of Bavaria, Bohemia, and Saxony once merged in that indefinite way politics and religion and war joined in those days, there used to be a small village, called Krummel. The village served a small, nameless (as far as the journals of the first of us are concerned) monastery which brewed a tiny amount of a special heavy beer, described as being as good and as thick as black bread. The village, lying in a small valley served by a single road of sorts which ended at the village, or beyond, as you will, existed solely for the purpose of growing grain, hops and such for the brewery. The monastery and thus the village belonged, ostensibly, to an old abbot in Hof, but it had been many years since the abbot had made the rough, long trip through a range of rugged hills to Krummel, and by the period which most concerns me, the monastery regulations were quite lax. In fact the only difference between a monk and a villager was where the man worked, brewery or fields. As you might expect, Krummel suffered a peaceful isolation, nearly untroubled by visitors from the world.

Sometime during the early years of the seventeenth century, though, a visitor did appear; one Jacob Slagsted, driving a combined medicine-peddler’s wagon, selling magic, feats of strength, stinking (thus potent) herbs, tinkering skills, and various domestic goods. This Slagsted seems to have been a giant of a man, but agile enough for his own wizardry. And even more impressive, he could read. He claimed to be a retired, reformed mercenary, and there may even be some truth in the village gossip which said, “Reformed into a highwayman.” There were even those who claimed that Slagsted was hiding from both the authorities and his own merry band of cutpurses.