One to Count Cadence (3 page)

She was not amused.

“A proposal?” I offered. Her fist skied off her hip. Probably not angry before, she certainly was now, thinking I
was
making fun of her. “Sure,” I hurriedly said, trying to make it all into a joke, “The closer to the meat, the sweeter is the bone. Leap in here and we’ll make the beast with two backs.” I didn’t think
her
father would mind. I laughed. I should not have.

“You son of a bitch! You smart-ass son of a bitch!” she screamed, then punched me right in the nose. With her fist like a large, bony knuckle. My nose started bleeding and that, for some sanitary reason, made her even angrier. She hit me again. On the nose. She must have smelled the liquor because she stepped back and accused me, “You’ve been drinking. You’re drunk, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” Her voice screeched like chalk on a blackboard and made my teeth ache.

“A man’s gotta have a little fun in this shithole.” The blood had dripped through my moustache into my mouth, so I spit on the other side of the bed. Bones hit me again. In the eye.

“Hey, will you cut that crap out?” I asked.

She hit me on the nose again. I debated hitting her (one of my ancestors, so it was told, had once hit a woman, but she had had a knife after him), so I decided not to. I spit a mouthful of blood on her pure skirt. It splattered the white cloth like dark sin, and I could not have hit her hard enough to make her jump back the way she did. A dirty trick, I admit, but better than hitting her. Also easier.

“You’ve ruined my uniform!” she shrieked. “You’ll be sorry! You’ll pay for that! And this too!”

I reached under my pillow and had a drink on that.

“Don’t you throw that bottle at me! Don’t you dare.”

God knows I wouldn’t have. No telling what she would have done to me.

“Get out of here, you silly bitch. Get out and let me die in peace.”

“Don’t you threaten me!”

“Ah, shit… Hawww!” I shouted, then threw the bottle in the opposite corner. She screeched and ran away like a wounded goat.

It was so quiet after she left that I could hear an occasional early golfer driving off the fifteenth tee and snatches of conversation and laughter from the fairways. The morning seemed fresh and bright, the air clean, and I wished I were playing golf out there instead of hell in bed. Then I was sorry I had thrown the bottle away because I wanted another drink. The one I’d had was working like magic in my stomach; better than coffee or food, it had awakened me.

Then Sgt. Larkin, the male nurse, rushed in, pushing a rattling tray of hypos. He was a short, stocky, hairy man who tried to give the impression he had seen everything. But he had not seen me.

“Okay, son,” he said, “Take it easy. Everything’s going to be all right.” He advanced, needle held like a knife in his hand, and reached for my unbroken arm. “This’ll make everything all right.”

“Then you take it. Keep off, man.” I jerked my arm away.

“Okay, buddy, let’s stop with the games.” He had a low level of patience. He tried to make his voice cold and military; but I didn’t give a shit for that now.

“Butt out, Larkin. Get that damned needle away.”

He reached again, and I slapped the needle out of his hand. The swinging of my arm released something in my blood, something hot and clean. It hardened into a calm, mean thing, clear and clean now, and I liked it.

“Okay, bud, we’re through with the games now,” he said, preparing another dose. “I don’t want to break your other arm, but you’re gonna get this one way or the other.”

“Don’t talk so much, tough man. Get on with it.” I felt a smile like a dare on my face. Larkin hesitated, then shook his head as if wondering what there was to be afraid of. I caught him with a stiff thumb in the windpipe as he leaned over the bed. Not too hard. Not too easy either.

He staggered backwards, his hands pleading at this throat, his eyes praying to me, then crashed into his tray. It danced drunkenly away on two legs, bounced off the wall, then swayed, throwing its glittering mad burden across the floor, then rolled slowly back towards Larkin. He gurgled and moaned, tossing.

“Don’t fuck with the Phantom,” I said, and he heard me before he passed out. The spasm in his larynx relaxed, and his breathing started again. But I didn’t pay too much attention. Christ was a carpenter; he could afford to forgive his enemies; I’m a warrior, and can’t.

It was quiet again, and I rested, testing the air with my bleeding nose. I pitied Bones for a moment, wondering how I might apologize. But kindness never really repays cruelty, I thought, Let her hate me. That might be the kindest thing of all. But then I laughed as I wondered what poor soul might rattle Bones together some day. “What a mess,” I whispered. “What a silly mess.” I was sure that somehow this was all Morning’s fault. Maybe the bastard was going to haunt me. I might have offered his ghost a drink of blood or Scotch, whatever its preference, but the Air Policeman Bones had called came in.

He was so tall and strong, his face nearly all jaw under the shadow of his cap. His mouth was compressed into a thin, unbent line, and he stood as if he might challenge the gods of war themselves; but he was a soldier, not a warrior. All show and slow to boot.

“All right,” he said, sharply. “What seems to be the trouble here.” He had glanced at Larkin and the scattering of glass with a look which said “inoperative” and dismissed them from his mind. “You there! What’s going on here?” He addressed an imaginary point where my head would have been if I could have stood.

“Me? Geez, I don’t know. I just work here.”

“You, fellow.”

“Say, sonny, ya’ll tilt that there sombrero back jest a scrunch so’s Ah cain sees ya’ll’s eyeballs. Ain’t likely Ah’d talk with a man, ifn Ah cain’t sees his eyeballs.”

He snapped to attention. “Cut the lip, huh.”

“You taking me in, airman?”

“No,” he answered in all seriousness. “Just going to hold your arm while they stick a needle in it. I’ve handled you nut-house cases before.”

“Oh, really. Well, let me show you something before you start handling this nut-house case,” I said, holding up my left hand. “See that hand, sonny. That’s a real mean hand. Registered with the police in seven states as a dangerous weapon. See those calluses on the side there, and on the fingertips. That’s a killer’s hand, son. You’d best watch it.”

“Ha, ha. You been seeing too many movies, fellow.”

“Perhaps, perhaps so, young man. That may well be the case. But the visualization of a dream certainly does not alter the essence of its reality; it enhances the reality.”

“You really are crazy, aren’t you? I guess you look sort of crazy.”

Ah ha, I thought, a nonbeliever, a discounter of dreams. And a warrior must dream. “I’m warning you, watch that hand.”

“You better stop going to those movies. You’re liable to get hurt,” he chuckled as the doctor entered, brisk, impatient, another blessing in hand.

“Away! foul son of Priam or be split asunder,” I shouted, waving my arm. “And the smoke of your pyre will trample the night like the hot, raging breaths of a stallion and the flames lick the sky like the hounds at his flanks.”

“Jesus,” the doctor said.

The AP laughed and stepped to the side of the bed. “Okay, sir, I’ll handle this crazy bastard,” he said, smiling just enough to bend the line of his mouth. I sneered, bunched my arm on my chest. He reached for it, then hesitated and shook his head like Larkin, then reached again.

But it wasn’t there. It had sped like a spear into that soft spot below the sternum, in, in to the knot of nerves, and quivered there. His eyes opened in the shadow of his visor. I had only intended a poke, a tap to let him know that I could, but my arm raised a soul of its own and spoke to something in mine. Again, swifter than thought, strengthened with a short grunt of nervous energy, my hand rejoined the battle. The AP’s mouth opened, though not in laughter, and the upper half of his body tilted over the bed. I raised the cast-bound arm, serious now, and swung, remembering a Paiute ghost dancer granted invulnerability by Wovoka, a Bulgarian under Krum seeking a Byzantine skull for his drinking cup, remembering every violent image dredged from the limitless memory of man, and the ghosts lent me strength. I took him on the side of the head above the ear. His cap flew away; his head and shoulder crammed against the wall, shattering plaster. He shivered in a spasmodic dance, then his eyeballs, visible now, rolled, and he joined Larkin on the floor. I, purged, lay back to ease my ragged breath. Then the pain came from my leg, twisted and sucked my soul back into the void, and I went thankfully away.

* * *

There was a bird, a woodpecker, standing on my head, pecking my nose. I clenched my eyes and rolled my head, but he kept up that incessant pecking. Each one came as a bright flash, tapping me out of the peaceful darkness. Goddamned bird. He wouldn’t get off my nose. He pecked exactly where it had been broken once, right in the tenderest spot. I strained to get my hands on him, but they would not move. Then a phrase from a bad Tennyson sonnet jumped into my head, something about a “still-recurring gnat.” But it wasn’t a gnat, it was a vulture… Then I woke.

Another Air Policeman, same size, etc., leaned over me, hitting the bridge of my nose at perfectly regular intervals with his billy, very light blows, only slightly heavier than a raindrop. He was good. No matter which way I turned my head, his baton was waiting there to keep up the beat. Tap! Tip! — ha, you Tap! missed Tap! that one. Tap! But only that one. Jesus, I thought, this is getting damn repetitious. I pictured an unending line of APs waiting outside the room. Surely twelve trials would be enough, I laughed to myself, But will this ever stop? Does a wave ask the circle of the sea for the shore? I laughed. Straps held my arms and I moaned. But the beat still went on. With a chant now, to my open eyes, “Tough guy. Tough guy. Tough guy.” I snarled at him, a growl, a lion harassed by the beaters: “Yaaaawwwwllll!”

The cadence stopped blinding my eyes, and I saw that he had stepped back. He was older, tougher than the other one, and informed me in a quiet voice how happy he would be when I recovered from my injuries, probably self-inflicted, and I could come visit his friends and he in their stockade. I snarled again, snapped like a hungry hound. He leaned solicitously over me, smiled clean teeth, and pleasantly intoned, “Tough guy.” His baton captured my attention as he rapped me gently in the crotch, almost tenderly. Then a bit harder, and the ripe, spreading pain and nausea began to flow, in, then out, leaving a great hollowness in my guts. “One more time,” he murmured.

Doctor Gallard came later, came with his portable X-ray and his concern.

“How’s the leg?” he asked as the technicians laid sheets of lead covering on my chest. He asked only about the leg. “I came as soon as I heard… about the incident. You didn’t hurt that leg, did you? Surely hate to go back in there.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is your nose bleeding?”

“Lt. Hewitt popped me one this morning when I made what she called advances toward her.”

“It shouldn’t still be bleeding.”

“I sneezed.”

Gallard glanced at the AP, then back at me as if to say I probably deserved worse than I had received. “Go ask the nurse for some ice and a cloth, corporal.”

“I’m supposed to guard him, sir,” he said, nodding at me. Like all warders, caged men frightened him more than free ones.

“I think I can prevent him from biting me, corporal. Go on.”

“I don’t know, sir. He’s a mean one, he is.” He chuckled.

“Don’t mock your betters,” I said to him, “lest they notice you.”

“You guys never learn, do you?” He stepped toward the bed.

“The ice, corporal.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gallard did not speak while the AP was gone, and made him wait outside when he came back. “You feel it’s your right to rape and pillage?” he asked, cradling the back of my neck with the ice.

“Achilles called rear-guard soldiers wine sacks with dogs’ eyes and deers’ hearts.”

“So what? You haven’t seen enough war to even know what it’s about, and yet here you are raising more hell than a regiment of Marines.”

“I knew, now I know. Besides, small things lead to bigger ones without anyone’s help. Acorns and oaks and all that crap. I wanted a drink. This came of only that. Takes two to make war. Things grow in this crazy world.”

“Of course,” he said, digging his hands into his hair as if searching for something very small and incredibly important. “So?”

“Not an excuse. Just what happened, that’s all. It was my fault, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry, or say I won’t do it again. I want to be left alone, and I will manage to be left alone.”

“Victim of an undeclared war, huh? Fighter for right and humanity? Killer of small, hungry men.”

“I was raised for a warrior. What else would you have me do?”

“That’s your problem, not mine.”

But you want it to be, I thought, And it will.

He finished with his business and went away.

I sang softly into the afternoon, sang to the green grass and sky, to the bright, burning haze of the sun, “Joe Morning, Joe Morning, where have we come?”

“This is a strange outfit, Sgt. Krummel,” 1/Sgt. Tetrick said on that morning I first arrived in the Philippines in the late summer of 1962. “Unusual. Different. We’re a small outfit, less than seventy men. It really ought to be good duty, but somehow it ain’t. The work’s too easy, and these kids get bored, and when they’re not bored, they’re pissed off. Their bowels jam up or run like crazy because of the work schedule, and their sleep is always screwed up.” Tetrick stood and shuffled his way over to the trick schedules. His feet were still tender from a case of jungle-rot he caught in Burma during the war. He was careful never to put a foot down any harder than necessary. He explained that the 721st Communications Security Detachment had only an Operations Section and a small Headquarters Section of cooks and clerks since most of the administration and personnel work was handled on Okinawa. The men in Operations, “Ops,” were divided into four tricks of ten men. Each trick worked six days, 0700 to 1600, then had a seventy-two hour break; six swings, 1600 to 2400, then a forty-eight hour break; and then six mids and another seventy-two hour break.