One to Count Cadence (17 page)

“Always had trouble with my head, man. But in high school I let it go; it was enough to be able to do it. It was like football: when the coaches tried to teach me how to throw a pass, tried to change the way I threw a pass, I couldn’t pass for shit, but my way, I could do it. Finally they left me alone, and I just threw the goddamned ball. But then that got to me too. Somehow I wasn’t throwing the ball, somebody else was. Or maybe it was more like having a machine in my head that plotted trajectories and found ranges and figured windage and force vectors and triggered the muscles. I always felt left out of the process.”

“No,” I interrupted, taking the cigarette he offered, “you are the process.”

“Aw, bullshit, that’s no good. I’m not part, if I don’t feel like I’m part, huh? No.

“Then,” he said, pausing to light up, his face fired by the match, crimson like the hot exhausts of the jets coming over our heads, “Then at Carlton I found out something. The hard way.” He laughed, but it sounded more like a snort. “I was making it with this chick, this good chick, down in Madison. A good kid but, Jesus, a bad scene. I was drunk most of the time, and mad at her most of the time for reasons I still don’t understand. Maybe because she made me happy, maybe for no reason at all. But I’d get mad, madder than hell, then I’d tear her into little pieces. I made fun of her Church, her meatless Fridays — here’s a piece of meat for this Friday, I’d say — her family, her friends, then I’d screw her and make her cry with passion, then laugh at her hypocritical tears, as I called them.” He nicked his cigarette over the fence, then walked back into the shadows next to the building.

“But she loved me, man, and she hung on, though God knows why. All the way. Until one really bad night when I was drunk, blind, stupid, black-out drunk, laying on the floor of her apartment, beating my head on the tiles, keeping time to the music from the beer joint below. I busted my head all up and bled all over the place, broke furniture and all that kind of shit. And that was all right; but I wouldn’t stop it with the head, beating away, and she couldn’t stop me, and I wouldn’t stop until I finally drank and battered myself into oblivion.” He lit another cigarette. His face was as tired as his voice in the quick light.

“Then the next morning she said, very calmly, very plainly, that this was too much. “Too much, Joe,’ she said. ‘You hate yourself too much. Either I’ll get lost when you get your head and heart together, or else I’ll get torn up in the fight. That’s too much,’ she said.

“I hated losing her,” he said, looking up at me, “and I gave her all the horseshit about being afraid to live and too ignorant to die, which was just true enough to really hurt — I seem to know weak spots naturally, too — but I sort of understood something about myself, why I’d been beating my head on the floor. I hated it, pure and simple, and in spite of my new attempts at being an intellectual, I hated my head because it wasn’t part of me. It has always felt like somebody’s head besides mine, and I didn’t understand, and I hated. She didn’t understand either, but she knew enough to get the hell out of the way. Enough.” He stopped talking again, and a jet engine being tested filled the silence with a steady, grating roar which seemed to rise out of the very night itself. Something was waiting in the darkness, an animal, a beast, all mouth and desire, growling, eating the very darkness, dissatisfied with the night.

“So what the hell did you want?” he said suddenly, shaking his head.

“I thought I wanted to beat your damned head in. But I guess I… I guess not. Let’s go in before that noise makes idiots of us all. Stay cool. Lt. Dottlinger is after your ass; he knows that you were the organizer of the mutiny.”

Morning started to say something, stopped, then said, “Don’t sweat it. I can take my own licks. If he wants me so much I may let him have all of me.” A rice bug, a pale cockroach-looking, flying beast as big as your thumb, crawled along the sidewalk, stunned from dashing into the wall under the floodlights. Morning stomped him into a brown spot

“He’s smarter than you think, and he’s drowning, Joe and he’ll hurt you. He knows how to do that, if nothing else ” I said, pausing at the door.

“You should know,” he said, grinning like Novotny. “They can’t hurt me, man. Not any more.”

“Not if you keep setting me up for the kill,” I said, smiling too.

Inside I shouted something about the Trick calling me if they needed to go to the latrine because after tonight it was obvious that they couldn’t pee without it running down their legs. They laughed, shot me the finger, assaulted my mother’s virtue, and we were all okay again. I told Novotny to police up the beer bottles on the way in.

“Hey, I’m ah… I’m…” he tried to say.

“Next time you want to get in some close order drill, tell me. I’ll arrange it.”

“Don’t do us any favors,” Morning said as I left.

It was over for now, and I enjoyed the cool peace of the night on my way back.

But, God, it’s never over. The finger of God is never satisfied always moving, always rewriting life, always making a scene go on and on until even He must cry, “God, will it never end,” even as His finger moves on.

* * *

“Where are they at?” Tetrick shouted at me as he came in the Orderly Room the next morning. Red splotches of frustration interrupted the yellow of his face. “You’ve got to be kidding me? Say it ain’t so. Get ‘em in here, Krummel, now. Every one of them.” I managed between flying arms and screams to get him into Saunders’ office. “Whatever you’re gonna say, no! already. I want those idiots in here.”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, no?” he shouted.

“They’re my trick. You said so. I took care of it. You hang them, you hang me.”

“I should hang myself. How could they do a thing like that? The Lieutenant will kill us all,” he said.

“He’ll never know.”

“He knows everything. He has a spy system better than the CIA. God,” he groaned, rubbing his shining head, “what’s next? No, don’t tell me. I couldn’t stand it.”

“Football season is next. Three weeks, then all the anger can go somewhere else.” I felt as if I should comfort him, maybe pat his shoulder, because he really did care about his troops. I’d never seen anybody like Tetrick before.

“Football, huh? Maybe you will all get killed.” He shuffled out as fast as his feet would let him. I followed. Dottlinger was standing in the middle of the door waiting for someone to call “Attention.” Dottlinger gave “At ease” his usual arrogant inflection, which made it mean exactly the opposite: “Don’t relax a second,” it said. He raised an eyebrow as if to ask what we had been doing in Saunders’ office, but he didn’t ask; he had other things on his mind; he was next.

* * *

No one ever quite figured how Dottlinger came up with the idea, but he did, and that same day he called a Pfc from the motor pool, a repairman from Trick Four, and Morning into his office to inform them that a board of officers would be assembled to decide if they should be undesirably discharged for immoral conduct. The other two were real trouble-makers — the Pfc got his kicks by beating up whores, and the repairman had gotten written up by the APs every time he went to Town — but Morning’s only sin was reporting three cases of the clap to the hospital.

Nearly everyone caught the clap in the PI; I think the official rate is about sixty percent, but that doesn’t take into account the married men with wives and without who were faithful, nor unreported cased treated by doctors in Town, which would probably put the rate for single enlisted men around eighty percent. Everyone on the trick except Collins and myself had fallen prey to the sly gonococci. Collins was reasonably faithful to his wife and extraordinarily careful about not catching the clap, wearing two condoms, only fucking on Wednesday afternoons when the whores received the results of their Tuesday morning smears, always carrying a bar of antiseptic soap in his pocket, and other such precautions which seemed to take the fun out of it, which may have been exactly what he was trying to do. I had already had my punishment from a sixteen-year-old high school girl in Atlanta, Georgia, on a three-day pass in 1953, and so I was somewhat more cautious than the others. Franklin had had six doses; he claimed one more notch than Quinn with five. But like everyone else, they went to the doctors in Town for their penicillin, so the hospital never knew. But Morning always said that he wasn’t going to take any chances with such a fun thing as his privates; no hypos of Wildroot Cream Oil masquerading as pencillin for him. So he went to the hospital all three times, the last time about a month before. The hospital always made a routine report of the third case to the unit commanders, but usually a bit of fatherly advice was all that happened. Service policy had changed from the days when a dose was an automatic bust; in fact thousands of posters pleaded with the troops to report to the hospital and promised no disciplinary measures. But an undesirable discharge is an administrative action, technically, so Dottlinger had his way to Morning.

Perhaps Dottlinger understood that, being a good (really), middle-class Southern boy, Morning probably felt guilty as hell about the doses anyway and that he probably bought the usual nonsense paraded everywhere in America — schools, colleges, corporations — that achievement is measured by collecting pieces of paper, and that a bad piece of paper, a bad discharge, like a criminal record, would haunt a man right into the grave (when in reality, no one ever asks to see your goddamned discharge anyway).

At first Morning seemed unconcerned, as if he understood the game and could care less about playing it. He drank the ritual fifth of VO, then tied the yellow and black ribbon from the neck of the bottle into his button hole, identifying him as a short-timer. He strutted around laughing and quipping, “I’m so short I can sleep in a matchbox, so short that when I fart, I blow sand in my eyes, so short.” But I saw, perhaps, a truer picture of how he was taking it one night during the next Break in the weight room.

(I lift weights, barbells, you understand; it’s been a secret long enough. I like it, in fact, I’m very snobbish about it. I dislike people with skinny arms who call it boring; I dislike pretty boys with their definition bulging and rippling like snakes coiling in a sack; I dislike hulks who think a 400-pound miliary press is the highest man can reach; but at the same time I’ve held each of these attitudes once, and am now quite sure that mine is unique, far superior, perhaps the only worthy attitude. I think weight lifting is beautiful, an art of circles, curves and graceful arcs, a delicate symmetry, an hypnotic calm in the repetition, a powerful contentment when the skin seems too small for the muscle.)

I was nearly finished with the workout, pleased with my body, really pleased that I had finally kept one resolution to spend a peaceful Break away from Town, when, through the louvers, I saw Morning get out of a cab. The light in the weight room was the only light on the second floor so his eyes rose naturally to it, but because of the artful deception of the screen, he couldn’t see me. But he shouted, anyway, “Lift and toil, Krummelkeg, you virtuous, muscle-bound, ant-brained idiot.”

“Ah, ‘tis Daemon Rum his-self,” I answered.

Shortly, he came in, more tired than drunk, face sunburnt and drawn, but his eyes glittered like glass ornaments. The bow of his short-timer’s ribbon, untied, drooped like a pennant in the rain.

I asked why he was back, suspecting the worst.

“Just tired,” he said, fooling me again, rubbing the stubble of beard. “I been sweatin’… sitting in a swing all day. Talkin’, talkin’ to a sweet little girl.”

“You found a new way,” I grunted, doing my first set of squats.

“No, man, really, a little girl. Bow-legged Dottie’s little girl. Went over with Quinn to fence some records for… so Dottie could. Anyway, he had to screw her first, and they made me take the kid out to the swing, you know, one of those old-fashioned bench swings.” He sat heavily on the edge of the mat, then flopped back, an arm covering his eyes. “So, man, I spent all morning popping bennies and drinking beer while Quinn was farting around. Then he and Dottie went off to sell the stuff and made me stay with the kid, but by then I wouldn’t have left for anything. Great kid, lotsa bennies, and the kid would run to the sari-sari store for beer. She fixed us lunch, like a party. Beautiful lunch. First time I ever noticed how pretty food is. Tomatoes about the size of your thumb, tiny little red things; white rice, as white as the sun; little bitty raw fish, churds, or chaps or something, little gray devils; and those great little bananas sort of hovering between green and yellow. Hey, man, one of the bananas was a twin, you know, two bananas in one skin. Dottie’s kid said that’s the best kinda luck, twin bananas. She said if we ate them, the two of us, we would get married, and I said she didn’t want to marry me ‘cause I was no good, and she said she did want to marry me ‘cause I was so sad. Ain’t that great, man. So sad. Jesus Christ, what a kid. Nine years old, man, and she knows more about life than Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, and your fucking Edmund Burke all thrown together in Archimedes’ bathtub.” He laughed and sat up. “Hey, man, you ever see how silly you look doing squats. You look like the most constipated man in the world.” He laughed again.

I finished the squats and put the weights up. “So go on. You got Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine and my fucking Edmund Burke in Archimedes’ tub singing ‘Im Forever Blowing Stinky Bubbles in the Tub.’ “

“No, man, Plato don’t allow no singing. Aristotle ain’t singing, it ain’t in the plan; he’s just sitting there farting and bitin’ the bubbles when they come up and calling it a catharsis. Ca-fucking-tharsis! Augustine is trying to hide a hard-on, and Edmund Burke is casting a baleful eye on the whole proceedings, wishing he had a hard-on,” he crowed, “and Archimedes run off with a belly-dancer from Bayonne, New Jersey, who promised to teach him about spirals and specific gravity and the Archimedean screw.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” I said.

“Maybe I should drink more,” he answered. “Particularly with lovely, sweet little girls. ‘Joe Morning,’ she said when I left, ‘How come you GIs all-a-time drunk?’ I think I love her.”