One to Count Cadence (16 page)

“How come?”

“How come? He’s a lover. That’s why. Girls in Town aren’t good enough for him. No, he’s got to have a captain’s wife. He got caught, then she screamed rape like they always do when an enlisted man gets between their legs. She screams rape from the middle of her bed and Hendricks crashes out the window carrying his clothes. It’s bad enough to run off, but then the Air Police catch him over behind the Kelly Theatre, and what’s he do? Pulls a knife, yes, cuts two APs, which is bad enough, but now when he can get away, what’s he do? Yeah, he climbs a telephone pole. They have to cut the pole down to get him. Smart kid. Now the least he’ll get is five years and a DD. A real lover.” Tetrick couldn’t have looked more unhappy, he couldn’t have had more wrinkles running back across his forehead up his tan scalp if he were the one on his way to Leavenworth.

I remembered Hendricks. A small, quiet boy from Kansas who worked part-time out at the riding stables, the kind of kid who preferred horses to people. “Damn, you wouldn’t think he would be the type, do you? Can he beat any of the charges?”

Tetrick sneered at me, but then he paused, chuckled to himself, and said, “Speaking of people who don’t look like it. Listen, keep this to yourself; don’t make me more trouble. Guess who’s shacking up with Sgt. Reid’s wife?” Reid was chief of Trick One, a pale, thin, thirtyish guy who looked more like a shoe clerk than a soldier.

“Who,” I said, “Dottlinger?” A joke.

“That’s right, smart guy.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Wish I was. Reid doesn’t know who yet, but he knows. She’s always been that kind. His last CO shipped him out to get rid of her. I’ll get her sent home when Saunders gets back, but can you see me going to the lieutenant and saying, ‘I got this slut, see, for you to send home.’ ” Tetrick grinned, but I think in defense.

“Listen,” I said, “next time you have some good news, be sure to tell me.”

“You just tell Morning to stay straight.” The grin was quickly gone. “If he makes waves, I’ll bust his ass. He won’t have to wait for the Lieutenant to think up something.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

I left Tetrick with his bad coffee and troubles; I had my own; he had given them to me my first day in the PI. On the way to work I was tempted to tell Morning that Dottlinger knew, but I was afraid that, in his mood, he would take the warning as excuse for action against the enemy, and I guess I was a little afraid, too, that in my mood I might egg him on.

* * *

Two nights later I had the OD and the Trick went to work a mid without me. Most of them were more than a little drunk at midnight chow, but Novotny was assistant trick chief and I trusted him to keep them working. At least they trooped out toward the motor pool on time, so I went back to the quiet Orderly Room and the novel Morning had forced on me,
The Wanderer,
which I managed to read until the phone rang about forty-five minutes after midnight. The CQ looked up at me and said, “Sgt. Reid.” Now it was my turn to wander, lost again.

“What the hell’s he want?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Reid?” I said into the receiver.

“Sgt. Krummel?” he said. He always called me “Sgt. Krummel” out of military courtesy. “Ah, where’s the relief?”

No rest for the weary,
I wanted to say, his voice was so tired. “Why? Aren’t they there? Where are you? What?” My rush of questions silenced him. I heard a sigh slip over the wire.

“Ah, where’s your Trick? They didn’t, ah, show up, and it’s, ah, an, ah, hour past relief now. Ah, my guys are, ah, complaining.” He never would have complained, but would have stayed at the desk at Operations working on through eternity with an occasional guilty glance at the wall clock, knowing that if he complained
they
would only shove the dirty end of the stick at him again. The note of resignation in his voice seemed to say,
Yes, I know my wife is fucking around; don’t all of them.

I assured him that the Trick had left the mess hall on time, reassured him that it was merely a broken down three-quarter or something so simple, and promised to check it out right away. I hung up in the middle of one of his “ah’s”; there could be no relief for a man like Reid.

The night driver in the motor pool, a mongoloid from Alabama, had refused to let the Trick use two jeeps in place of a, yes, disabled three-quarter because motor-pool policy specified only, one “vehickle purr trick.” “They gave me some shit, man, but I tole ‘em to hop their little ole Yankee asses in a cab or somethin’,” he said to me.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Motor-pool policy,” he said, waving his arm at the dew-shining green metal and black asphalt, the dull canvas, the flood lights so quickly absorbed by the dank, dark air.

“Motor-pool policy,” he said again, as if that explained the world.

“If there is any trouble out of this, soldier, I’m going to have your ass in a sling by noon tomorrow,” I said, savoring for a moment the amazement lighting, as best anything could, that peckerwood face. “Shut up and get me a jeep real fast,” I said as he started to answer, “Now.” Rank does have its privileges, but only seldom do the privileged have the rank.

I found the Trick about a mile out the gate highway, walking in a shambling group, and I assumed they were looking for a cab until I saw the case of beer on Morning’s shoulder, the bottles flashing in every hand. Franklin was taking a leak as he walked and the others were trying to stay out of range; Quinn had a beer in each hand, taking alternate drinks with military precision. I pulled up behind them and their faces and hands scrambled for a moment trying to hide the beer, then Quinn saw me getting out of the jeep and he smiled and shouted, “Hey, Morning, get old man Krummel a beer.”

“Throw the beer in the ditch and fall in,” I said.

They all smiled and walked toward me, Morning with an offered beer.

“Throw the beer in the ditch and fall in,” I repeated. Smiles became perplexed. “Now!” They huddled back upon themselves. “Right now!” Collins bent over to try to set his beer down without spilling it. “Throw them in the ditch.” He did. Morning threw the beer he had been offering me, flung it against the ground, and his eyes glared “what the shit” but he was too angry to say it. “Fall in!”

“What the fuck’s with you, Krummel?”

“Sgt. Krummel to you, Pfc Morning,” I said as I took the half-empty case off his shoulder and pitched it in the ditch. Again his anger stifled his voice, and in his silence the others attempted a formation based on his unmoving figure.

“Attention,” I ordered, and attention I got as they gathered old instincts and shuffled into straighter lines, stiffer stances. Morning still stood at an angle, half-crouched as if his anger curled his guts, his face scattered in wrath, mouth open, an eyebrow questioningly raised, a mad eye, the whole structure flushed in frustration, quilted in grief. I told him to straighten up. He did, and rage tightened his body into quivering stone, the first tentative nudge of an earthquake. He began to stammer, his lips jittering and a spray of spit flying out; but I told him to knock it off before his mouth could shape a word.

“Dress right, dress!” Again the training memories came back after a wondering moment. Morning had his mouth shut now, his face clenched like a fist; thumb screws, bamboo splinters, nor the rack could have made him say shit — but I did.

“I don’t know what kind of little gathering this is, but I want you people to know, it’s over.”

“Shit.”

“One more word, Morning,” I hissed into his very face, “even a grunt, and you are through.” Before he could test me, I shouted, “Right face. Forward march. Double-time march,” and then he was trapped with the others, stumbling along the road. “Novotny, fall out and see if you can keep cadence for these girl scouts.” I climbed back in the jeep and followed them as they ran the two miles on out to Operations. Everyone threw up at least once, and Haddad had to be half-carried half dragged between Quinn and Collins. All their backs reflected the shame which was on their faces; except Morning. They all knew something, except Morning; not so much their error, because that wasn’t important, but the breaking of a trust, making me have to play the hard-ass (perhaps more ass than hard). A broken trust, a defiled faith, so we were all ashamed. Except Morning, and his anger spoke eloquently of the guilt he bore. We both knew whose idea the beer had been, and I wondered if this confrontation hadn’t been what he had been after all this time. His rage blossomed so wonderfully when he was guilty; he indulged his anger, perhaps because with something outside to hate the vague phantom-demon he hated in himself let him alone, and together both halves hated not in an arithmetical progression of one plus one, but geometrically as dynamite adds to dynamite, so that he must explode. The others would be loosed from their shame by this run, and then a single joke, a laugh, and then we would be back in this thing together. But I wondered if Morning and I would have to fight to ease his guilt. I thought this might be the easy way (and I sometimes, when bed sores tickle
my
guilt, think it might have been the best way). His guilt, my shame eased in a blind flurry of fists, and afterwards battered faces, grins splitting bleeding lips, friendship cemented — but only if we fought to a draw, for neither of us could bear to lose in front of the other — his guilt, my shame eased. (Let me mention, lest you think I worried overlong about doing my job, that mine was perhaps the easier to endure. I
was
riding in the jeep, and he
was
struggling in the ditch. The twentieth century hasn’t quite convinced me that physical pain is easier to bear than mental pain. Not quite. Keep that in mind.)

I hailed two taxis and sent them to Ops where they were waiting; the drivers laughing at the panting, puking rabble I herded into the compound. Reid met me at the gate with pale questions and whimpering objections, but I shut him up with a promise that we would make up twice the time the next two nights and told him that everything was all right. That’s what he wanted to hear: that everything was all right. Had he for a moment suspected that his wife’s lover had arranged this delay? His face answered,
Don’t they always.

I told him that I would appreciate it if that dick-head Dottlinger didn’t hear about the incident. He hesitated before answering, and I wanted to scream the truth at him. But he was really worried about who was going to pay for the cabs. So I did. Then I went to get Morning and we went out back.

Turning from me, he walked over to the fence, anger still shaking his hands. “Well, what the hell you want?” he asked when I didn’t say anything.

“What do I want? What do you want? A stunt like that — Jesus Christ, Morning.”

“So I screwed up, man. So what? Didn’t you ever make a mistake? Didn’t this shit ever get to you? Is it ever too much?”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” he said, turning as the beacon on the control tower turned. “Just too much.”

“You make me sound like a sergeant: but that’s no excuse. We’re all in the same shit.”

“It’s not a fucking excuse, it’s a reason. Can’t…” Silent for a moment, he turned back to the fence, hung his fingers in the mesh, staring out like a… like lost child? caged animal?… more like a man who didn’t know if he wanted in or out, or even which side was in or out. “I’m just tired, man. I feel like I’m nine hundred years old. It’s all too much, the army, Town, this stupid job; it’s too much sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep forever, then I wouldn’t have to fuck with the world. I can’t stay straight; I can’t even go to hell right.” He paused; I waited.

“That’s funny. I was thinking about something today, you know. About problems. I used to be good at math, you know,” he said, speaking as he had that first time I saw him talking to the mirror, detached, commenting on his soul as if it were a problem of formulas. “Really good at math. I should have majored in math or physics or engineering or something like that. At least that’s what they always said, and I might have, if I hadn’t tried to major in accounting to spite my old lady. God, you know, she used to put my old man down for being a bookkeeper. A cipher, she called him. Classic, huh? So classic it’s a bore, you know.

“But there was another reason, too, why I didn’t major in math. I didn’t understand… I couldn’t… I could work problems, could really work hell out of them. And not just plugging numbers into a formula either. When I started calculus, in high school, the teacher gave us a problem, something about getting a ladder around a corner in a hall, just to show us what one looked like. And I worked the damn thing without calculus. She couldn’t believe it. She loved me because I was her best student, but for a moment I could tell that she thought I had done something wrong, and she never liked me after that for some reason. But I worked the damned problem, by God, I worked it, just like I solved all the other ones, but the thing is, the thing always was, I didn’t know how I knew how to work it. I didn’t understand why my mind worked that way. No one else could work it, but it was easy for me, but I didn’t know why, or how. I could just do, you know, but I couldn’t understand how, and that almost drove me bugs, man.

“Just like when I started school. I could read before I started the first grade, and I knew that no one else could, so when this old bitch starts off with flash cards and the alphabet crap, I raised my hand and asked, “Where are the books?” The class all laughed and giggled, and Miss Minder, who was old and hated kids, probably for good reason, threw a fourth-grade reader in my hands and told me to read and so I read, and when I finished a page, said, “Where are the hard books? This is only a fourth-grade reader.” All the kids laughed and Miss Minder almost cried she was so mad, and I thought I was going to be the leader of the band. But I quickly discovered that nobody liked me because I could read and they couldn’t, and then they didn’t like me because I made good grades. So for the next eight years, until it became all right to be smart, I was the dirtiest, dumbest kid in school. On purpose.” He paused as four jets roared over then settled like fat mallards against the runways.