One to Count Cadence (10 page)

“How much?”

“Ten bucks a month to Haddad. He handles the arrangements and accounts, credits three-to-one, pesos to dollars, on your money, keeps the place up, pays the bills and gives the excess to the orphanage to outfit our basketball team and buy books.”

“Come on,” I scoffed.

“He’s in love with one of the teachers, but she won’t have anything to do with him because he’s in the market. She thinks he’s a threat to the economy, an arrogant Jew American Ugly. But she lets him coach the basketball team, and buys the books with the money he gives her…”

“But that’s by God all he gives her,” Quinn shouted, then reared and roared again, his tooth flashing like the flint of cynicism in his laugh.

“We’re a bunch of fucking philanthropists,” Novotny said.

“A bunch of fucking nuts,” I said, slapping Morning on the shoulder. “Move over and let another one in, mother.”

“There’s five guys from Trick Four who use the place,” Morning added. “But they break when we’re working, so we don’t get in each other’s way.” He paused expectantly.

“So?”

“One of them is a Negro…”

“So?”

“I just thought, if you minded, I should let you know.”

“No sweat, Morning,” I said.

“Just wanted to avoid trouble.”

“You? Come on. You make trouble in gallon jugs, Morning.”

“Sells well, anyway, man. Let’s go have a drink.”

“Take two — they’re small.”

“Goddamn, yours are,” Quinn said, grinning slyly. “You a two or three beer man?”

As we walked away, laughing, Cagle remained leaning against the wall. He hadn’t moved during the whole time. Morning went back to wake him up.

“Little fart can crap out anyplace,” Novotny said.

Just as Morning reached for his shoulder, Cagle jumped at him, screaming and brandishing a knotted cane like a saber. Morning leapt backwards, arms and legs spread like a spider’s, shouted “Sonofabitch!”, then hopped forward as if out of physical control. Cagle parried Morning’s arms, slid into him like a fencer and stabbed him in the heart.

“Touché!” he smirked. “What sort of spy are you, Agent Monday Morning. Taken in by the sleeping-dog lie. Ha! I’m sending you back to the Sally League.”

Morning was limp. “Someday I’m going to kill you, Cagle.” He wasn’t angry; but he had been scared. In spite of the calm and composure with which he carried himself, Morning was intensely nervous. He was forever on edge, but it never showed except when something like Cagle’s attack caught him with his face down.

But never the same thing twice, Novotny explained as we caught a jeepny to go for a steak at the Esquire. Cagle had been scaring hell out of Morning since Basic, when he had crawled into Morning’s tent one night on bivouac. Morning had torn up the tent pegs and run ten yards in his sleeping bag before Cagle calmed him down. Another time, after they had gotten to the Philippines, Cagle had hidden under Morning’s bunk, waited until he was asleep, then reached up and grabbed his throat. Morning had gasped and stiffened, then didn’t move for several minutes. Worried, Cagle crawled out, turned on the light and found Morning wide-eyed and white, his breathing so deep it shook the bunk, and his pulse so furious, his hands fluttered on his chest. Cagle had to pour cold water on him to bring him around.

I wondered what Morning had thought during that time, then realized that he had thought nothing. He had been turned off as completely as if he were dead. I reminded myself to ask him about it someday. He sat in the front seat of the jeepny, alone with the driver, apparently relaxed, smoking and watching the road as we hurried out of Town. Nipa huts flashed into walls, and Morning’s smoke whipped around my head. He seemed to have regained his calm by the time we reached the Esquire, halfway between Base and Town, and laughed about it over a bleeding steak and a beer.

* * *

Later that night, drunk again, Novotny and I were laughing and stumbling our way down a street unfamiliar to me on our way to the apartment, which I still hadn’t seen. It was nearly midnight, and people were moving: some home after work, airmen back to the Base or into hiding until 0600 the next morning, and those Filipinos who seemingly wandered the streets at all hours. I was trying to tell Novotny something, I don’t remember what, when I looked around and he was gone. His face, his brilliant teeth masked in a leathery grin, had been assimilated into the random movement of the ill-lit night. In turning to search for him, I forgot which way we had been walking. I could see in the alcoholic fog around my head, but I couldn’t remember what I had seen. I pushed through the crowds along the side of the street, forced there by the increased traffic of jeepnys and cabs heading for Base, but I didn’t see anything I recognized, then realized that I didn’t know where the fabled apartment was anyway. As I decided to return to Base, and turned to hail a jeepny, they were all gone. Zip. The rocking street was empty except for a few stragglers hurrying underground and listless whores stretching their backs after another night’s labor. An old woman’s cardboard hand fluttered against my arm and her hesitant, fluting voice said something. I thought her begging, and shook my head. She was insistent with those stiff fingers on my elbow, and I understood she was selling. Not me, old hag of a woman, I thought, Not rich, creamy all-American me. But I let myself be led into an alley, saying to myself that it would be at least a safe place to sleep as she guided me over obstacled darkness, over rough ground threatening to rise at me with each step, into a small black cauldron of a room.

(But no sleep is safe: it all echoes death.)

I let her unresisting flesh ply its trade under me, added my load to those long never-remembered other ones which filled her crinkly skin. As I labored, I dimly heard rats gnawing at the rafters, the sound of their teeth on the wood and their squeaking voices a calliope above us. I asked why? and answered with abstractions like “responsibility to contracts made in good faith” and “be polite to old ladies and children” and the other rules by which I thought I lived. But I must have already known how the rules were failing me, the ordered forms gone in the rip that began with the rupture of my marriage and proposed career (how silly that word sounds now). Or perhaps with the rupture of my mother’s maidenhead. Or, God knows, before. I hadn’t learned about poetry and war yet. I still believed in salvation — and here I was seeking order and saving grace as my castle tumbled into the rising seas, searching with that funny finger in that aged dike below, that rebel finger which below me lived, aye, and even enjoyed. I mated with dark flesh that night, and she bore me dreams, magic, and hope, storm-festered dreams, magical revenge, and hope, and I never kissed her wrinkled face again and again.

* * *

Cagle was drunk. He walked straight down the sidewalk, but he half-faced the street, drifting like a Piper Cub in a high wind. Morning was in a foul mood, sulking about the fourteen ladies’ drinks he had lost to Bubbles at the Hub. Three days in Town had flayed the skin from my body, and I was already making those familiar resolutions never to come back. We were walking up to the main street, looking for a jeepny to take us back to Base. As we passed the door of a foul den known as Mutt & Jeff’s, three airmen burst out the door. The first and largest one was talking to the two behind him, and humped into Cagle. Cagle rebounded two steps, then went forward again before the airman could move. He elbowed Cagle out of the way, and snorted something about “Lookin’ where the hell you’re walkin’ ” and started back down the street in the direction from which we had come.

Morning, without a word, ran back to them, grabbed the airman’s shoulders, spun him around and shoved him against his two buddies.

“You want to push somebody, mother-fucker, you push me,” Morning said, anger quivering like a wind-tossed flame in his voice. “Don’t push, man.”

The airman had been openly attacked, was slightly larger than Morning, and probably felt himself in the right. He and his two pals charged just as I ran back to make peace. I tried to say something about not needing to fight to the other two guys, but one was already throwing a roundhouse right at me. I covered up, ducked and pushed the first one back into the second. When he rushed again, I stepped back and kicked him in the chest. He staggered backwards into the street and sat down in a puddle to get his breath. I asked the other guy if he wanted any of me, and he agreed that he didn’t.

“Let’s break this up before the APs arrive.” He agreed again.

Morning, for all his anger, was boxing. He had the guy against the wall, stepping in and out, ringing the airman’s ears with combinations of body punches and open-handed slaps. Morning’s body was turned, his chin tucked and his right protecting his face in a nearly classic stance. The slaps smacked loud and arrogant. Morning played with the guy, nearly letting him out, then driving him against the wall with the blinding, deafening slaps, but without hurting him badly enough so he could quit with some semblance of honor.

I stepped between them, peeled them apart, and held them off. Morning’s chest was trembling so fast under my hand that I wondered if he was going to hit me. But the other guy did. It was only a blind slap from a dazed and confused kid trying to beat off a nest of hornets, but it glanced off my tender twice-broken nose. I shoved him against the wall, set him up with a poking jab to the head, layed two right hooks under his heart, then dropped him with a forearm slam to the face when he bounced off the wall. He slid to a squat at the base of the wall, head in hands. I whirled back — Morning was grinning. The airman who hadn’t gotten in the fray was looking after his buddy in the street who was walking and breathing again.

“Boy, you really broke up the fight,” he sneered at me. “A real fucking peace-maker.”

“I’m sorry…” I started to say, but realized he neither understood nor cared to understand, and besides was right, I suppose. He had to say something to cover his guilt for not helping his friends.

“I’ll… I’ll remember your ugly fucking face,” the other one shouted as Morning and I walked to where Cagle leaned patiently against the wall. “We’ll catch your ass some night, son of a bitch. In a dark alley, by your-god-damned-self!” I walked back to them, thinking, What a long eighteen months it was going to be.

“Let’s stay straight, buddy. You swung at me before I could say hello. You just made a mistake. You should have stayed out of it like your pal here. So shut your mouth before you make two mistakes in one night. Next time I see you all, I’ll buy the beer. And tell the other guy to watch where the hell he’s walking. Okay? Okay.”

“Okay,” they said in chorus.

I caught up with Morning and Cagle. Morning was chuckling quietly.

“You guys through yet,” Cagle muttered.

“Set them straight?” Morning asked, grinning as we hailed a jeepny. He was loose now.

“Maybe they won’t cut us off at the pass.”

“Piss on ‘em.”

“You’re pretty good for a passive resister, Morning.”

“That’s why I’m here. I took crap from rednecks as long as I could, then one spit in my face one hungover morning at a lunch counter in Birmingham. I dropped his peckerwood ass.” He took a plate of four teeth out of the left side of his mouth and showed it to me. “But his gentlemen buddies got me. Damnit, I forgot to take this damned thing out,” he mumbled, putting it back in. “Someday I’m going to take a shot in the gut and choke on my plastic teeth.” He laughed. “How’d you like to try to swallow that monster of Quinn’s?”

We were on the highway now and the quiet whiz of the tires, the cool wind and the receding lights of Town made the fight seem far away. As we swept past the Cloud 9, a wild burst of laughter shot out to meet us, mocking my thoughts.

“You’re pretty salty yourself,” he said.

“I’m out of practice, Morning, and intend to stay that way. The next time you tee-off on a guy just because you’re pissed at a broad, count me out.”

“Bullshit,” he said, smiling again, stretching his arms and popping his knuckles. “So I was pissed off. What’s your excuse?”

“With you on the Trick, my stripes aren’t worth a rusty razor blade.”

“Not me, man. I don’t rock the boat.” He flipped his cigarette away and it flashed past me in a streaking red line, then sparkled the road like the fuse of a firecracker. He rubbed his hands greedily together, savoring the heat of violence. As I noticed him, I caught my own hand cradling my right fist, remembering the solid clunk it had made against the airman’s ribs. My wrist would hurt the next morning, but not very much. No more than Morning’s hands.

Tetrick’s admonition to step easily with Lt. Dottlinger commanding the Company proved all too correct. During the set of days after my lengthy initiation into the seminal rites of Town, a small incident, the breaking of four cases of bottles, touched off the events known as The Great Coke Bottle Mystery, or Slag Krummel Rides, Howsoever Badly, Again.

It was a Wednesday or Thursday morning — without the limits of an established weekend period of rest, we seldom knew the day of the week. Lt. Dottlinger always checked the Day Room first thing each morning. He counted the pool cues and balls, and the shuffleboard pucks, examined the felt of the pool tables for new nicks or tears, and made sure the Coke machine was full. These things were nominally his responsibility since the equipment had been purchased from the Company Fund and the Coke machine was a concession of the Fund. All seemed well until he felt a bit of glass crunch under his spit-shined shoe. He picked it up, and found it to be the lip ring off the rim of a bottle. He knew the trick: two rims hooked together, then jerk, and a neat little ring of glass pops off one or both. He didn’t see any others at first, but when he examined the trash in the houseboy’s dust bucket, he found dozens of rings. Also, he noted, there were hundreds of cigarette butts, in spite of his standing orders against extinguishing them on the Day Room floor. He checked the four cases of empties. All except for one had been broken. Dottlinger took the dust bucket and dumped its contents in a neat pile in front of the innocently humming Coke machine. He shooed the houseboy out, closed and locked the double doors opening to the outside passageway, unplugged the Coke machine, which burped twice like a drunken private in ranks, rolled shut the louvers on both walls, turned off the lights, then locked the entrance from the Orderly Room.