One to Count Cadence (20 page)

“Don’t make troubles for me. I don’t need them. Sgt. Reid didn’t show up for work again this morning. Twice this week already. Once more and I’ll have the Operations officers down here bitching at me again.”

“I can’t let it sit. I’ve got to do something. It’s all wrong.”

“Now you’re talking like him. Leave it alone. Don’t make waves for yourself. He’s not worth it.”

“Maybe not.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing. See you.”

I left with, as the saying goes, a germ of an idea, though it turned out to be a disease, a plague on both our houses.

* * *

It cost me thirty dollars (because I didn’t have ten cartons of Salems, fastest moving menthol cigarette on the black market) and a whole tired afternoon listening to Dominic stomp his peg leg against the Plaza bar to make points about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. He told a fair account of the coming of the revolution to his small town:
guardia civil
executed kneeling against a wall, Fascists clubbed and beaten over a cliff by a mob of drunks, a priest reaped with sickles. But I’d heard it before. I paid the price and in return received a solemn beery pledge from Dominic, on his honor and faith as a stout member of the
revolution,
on the soul of his leg buried in a nameless Spanish grave, that he would take prompt, decisive action, and send the evidence by way of my houseboy.

I heard nothing for a week. Morning stayed away from me, and when work forced us together, he avoided talk, feeling, I assume, that he had talked too much already. He was odd that way. He had a compulsive need to confess, and often expounded on the need for complete honesty in human relations, love, friendship, etc., but after the kind of confidence which he claimed drew people closer, he always drew away again. But finally the manila envelope appeared crinkling under my pillow, and I quickly spilled the 8x10s on my bunk, half in fear, half in excitement.

There they were: Sgt. Reid and his skinny wife in their bed. Damn Dominic’s fumbling one-legged idiot soul. Reid looked as he always looked, as if he didn’t exactly know what was happening. His wife seemed to know precisely what was going on, but she was looking at her husband, her head cocked like a setter bitch, as if wondering, trying to remember who she had climbed into bed with this time, or perhaps wondering what her husband was doing in her bed. She had a sullen, sly face in the glossy print. A thin, pouting face probably a great deal like the face of Morning’s Rita Whitehead. A thin Scotch-Irish build, a bony small frame so common in the South (as if poverty had its own special gene), hair tangled in rats’ nests, small breasts with long, almost stringy nipples — I didn’t see what Dottlinger quite saw in her but, of course, nor did I understand what she saw in that bastard; except perhaps a congenital attraction to bastards.

The three other pictures exhibited a bit more diligence and imagination on Dominic’s part. It made me sick. Dottlinger and Reid’s wife were chemically locked in that most compromising of love’s positions, known in the idiom as 69. I’d seen blue movies, stag films, before, but always drunk, and now I knew why. Love is private, and whatever its motives or methods, it deserves that privacy. The thought of how confused and dazed Reid must have been, caught in his own bed by blackmailers, was bad enough, but Dottlinger’s exposure somehow touched a more tender wound. I marveled that he had both the imagination and guts to love a woman that way (for it does take imagination and guts for a Southern boy: the term “cock-sucker,” certainly a vile implication across America, in the South refers not to fellatio, but cunnilingus, linguistically). Then the terrible thought came: what if they really were in love, star-crossed lovers? and Dominic intruding with a dirty foot, my man against love? Party myself to accidental evil, I almost threw the photographs away. I did tear Reid’s candid shot and the negative into bits, but I was a blackmailer with a mission and, saying “The greatest good for the greatest number,” I was on my way, telling myself, as one must in this sort of affair, “Don’t force the rat into a corner; leave him room to negotiate.” I thought I might begin by asking for his resignation in exchange for the negatives, and work from there… But then I laughed, a smothered giggle, a belch, then a roar. I stumbled back to my room and, laughing harder than I had in months, burned the prints and the negatives and the manila envelope. (I must admit that I took another look at the pictures which, as I remember, I laughed at tenderly, delightedly.) Fire and laughter and a bit of madness saved me from being both fool and martyr (and Morning).

I went to the Provost Marshal’s Office and found a smart Dartmouth lawyer serving his time with a wry smile and a wonderful ability to beat courts-martial. I explained, with some slight exaggeration, Morning’s plight, and within the hour he had called Dottlinger, quoted some legal, Latin nonsense to him (I think I overheard
Illegitimi Non Carborundum;
I hope so), and Dottlinger dropped the whole idea the same day. (Morning I saved, but incidentally loosed two more idiots on the world. One later made it to Leavenworth anyway, but the other went straight. Two out of three will get a fellow out of the Sally League any season.) Morning acted his part with mock sadness, I with mock humility; but he spoke to me again.

Football practice began the next week, Capt. Saunders came back the next, and we slogged on through the tail end of the rainy season, crazy about down-field blocks, gang-tackling, and mud.

* * *

It all seems important now, and there was so much more… a great football season, an undefeated team with Morning at quarterback and me running the defense, backing the line. A really fine season, a wonderful time, but I’m not sure what it might mean to you. Our last game — we had won the base championship the game before — we were quite drunk. Morning’s passes faltered and tumbled like wounded ducks, and my defensive signals were at best unintelligible and more often confusing. During the last quarter we alternated between an eleven-man line and an eleven-man secondary. When first presented with an eleven-man secondary, the opposing quarterback left the field in disgust. But none of it mattered. Receivers — stretcher-bearers, I assume — appeared under Morning’s sick passes; there was little need for defense since the other team not only couldn’t hold the ball, they couldn’t walk. The disgusted quarterback tripped on his way off the field; his receivers dropped seven passes in the end zone in the first half. And we couldn’t do a thing wrong. Even I scored a touchdown on a two-yard plunge that Morning arranged for me. It was my first and really a thrill, except that I plunged through the end zone into the goal posts which shattered my shoulder pads and fractured my collar bone.

So I spent New Year’s Eve 1962 in Baguio in a cast. I should have never let Morning call that play. I had to drink left-handed. Morning found a bar, The New Hollywood Star Bar. It was a
real
place because there was no icebox for the beer, no one put money in the jukebox but lifted the face and punched the songs they wanted, and the other patrons were Communists, students, and gold-miners, representing the labor and radical wings of the party. Morning played Trotsky to their Stalin and Mao, and they loved it. No one spoke to me because Morning told them I was a major when I was gone to the latrine the first night. Morning also fell in love at The New Hollywood Star Bar. The girl was
real
too, a short, stocky Benguet girl; young, pleasantly plump, with a square face and square hands and fingers, and best of all (as Morning told me seventy-two times that night) dirty fingernails. He had visions of sleeping with her in a tiny nipa hut, surrounded by jungle, washed by rain, devoured by her muscular body. But she wouldn’t go the first night, and on the second she had cleaned her fingernails and wanted lady’s drinks and a trip to the Club on John Hay. The first night she drank beer from heavy glasses, drank like a man with dirty fingernails. The second night he argued louder and longer with the Communists, and I had visions of fighting our way out, but nothing came of it. Later, in our room at the Club over a bottle of Dewar’s he insisted that I tell him about my wife. Insisted in that drunken, persistent, arrogant way he had; his fist clenched except for the forefinger, which he held up with his thumb. “You need to talk about it, Krummel. You need to.” He kept it up until I threatened to bust him even with one arm tied around me. He believed me, though, and let it go. But the next day he blew up at Cagle (who was a hell-and-back-again better golfer) on the golf course, and Cagle took after him with a four wood. Morning was stunned for a second, but then leapt down the fairway, Cagle two steps behind, and Novotny two steps behind him, leaving me collapsed in laughter on the tee and three very amazed caddies watching it all. Novotny caught Cagle and disarmed him, and while he sat on him, Morning apologized so contritely, so humbly that Cagle began to laugh, and when they came back up the fairway we were together again. They finished the eighteen holes in the rain as I tried to keep my cast from getting wet, all of us convinced that we were the four greatest guys alive. Then we feasted on two-inch thick sirloins, and drank cognac in our room until we were disgustingly maudlin, stupidly drunk, and God-ever-so happy; blind drunk and lost. We stood at the edge of the bluff in front of the Club in a windy, wet night, staring at the lights far down in the valley, looking up at the clouds so close. Wet and in the wind we were almost cold, chilled for the first time in months, and we savored it, warmed ourselves with cognac; but already in the wind, in the waning rain, came word of the long, hot dry season, a hint of dust, a touch of fear.

There is so much to tell, so much…

The morning the Huk bandits tried to rob the Central Exchange, my trick was on the last of a set of mids. The six mids had seemed like six months to me. It had been too hot too long. The work had long lost any magic for me. Even Town was too dreary to bear. Hot and dusty and dry. The manure dropping from
calesa
ponies raised small dust storms in the street, and the wet cakes dried before they could stink. It had been five months since Lt. Dottlinger had tried to take Town away from us, but we would have given it to him now.

At 0200 I telephoned the Flight Line, hoping that we had received courier mail on the 0100 flight from Travis, but there was nothing. I crossed a flying trip to the Flight Line with Cagle bulling the three-quarter all over the road from my list of possibilities to make the rest of the trick bearable. I wandered around the room several times, checking copy sheets, half-hoping Morning would start an argument or a word game or anything to pass the time. All the men were jabbering about the Trick’s Break trip to the beach at Dagupan planned for the next three days, but I had heard about nothing else for the past week, and didn’t want to hear any more. Back at my desk I wrote the 0300 entry in the log — something nonsensical, hoping for a laugh when it was read, but knowing no one ever read the damned thing anyway. The room and all its contents seemed to be turning gray. All the equipment, desks, chairs and consoles were already gray, and the faded green fatigues could have been gray in another light, and the cream walls were surely a shade of ashes. The same talk, the same faces. Without windows who could know if it was day or night outside? I might have been trapped in that square one-room building for months, even years, and not know it. The same work, the same non-work.

I sat down and allowed myself to enjoy the idea of soldiering again — usually I didn’t think about it. I could have almost been excited about spit-shining my footgear, or laying out a full field inspection for myself. But I had my houseboy for those things, and no real reason to do them anyway. No more were the three fingers of my right hand stained soft and brown like those of the Negro shineboy in my home town. (Boy? Old Luke was sixty when I was ten. Morning must strain in his grave when I say that.) No longer the pleasant order of a perfect bunk, or me in khaki stiff armor and standing tall. But like most men, I fell easily into the easy life. Luxury is like a Sunday afternoon nap: “Oh, I meant to, ah…” but you are already dead for an hour or two, and you always wake with a filthy taste in your mouth. But you, and I, will sleep again next Sunday. If they took your houseboy away, Krummel, you’d cry like a baby. Besides, soldiering is for brutes and animals who don’t understand, and you, Krummel, are an educated, sensitive and intelligent man, and…

A face appeared before me. Distraction, I shout! But who would it be but Peterson with a tale about a new girl at the Skylight, a real honest-to-God blond named Gloria who was an ex-movie star from Manila. He thought he might shack steady with her since she was the best thing eighteen years of life had found him. Or was it nineteen?

“Sure, Pete, I fucked her once. Her hair’s bleached, she uses too much make-up to cover small-pox scars, and she gave a guy a blow-job in a blue movie once. Lovely girl,” I shouted above the electronic whispering and the grinding of the damned malfunctioning air conditioner. Voices stopped, heads turned. Peterson, poorest son of Peter, frowned slightly and spoke to his friendly trick chief, “Geez. I thought she was a nice girl, Sarge,” then quietly dissolved into a film of ashes. I swung out of my chair and up the ladder to the roof before I got soot in my eye. “Geez,” he said behind me.

On the roof I slammed the trap door on the noisy square of light. Novotny turned from his post at the edge of the roof. I waved at him, and he turned around to lean on the waist-high wall which outlined the roof. The compound was as bright as a supermarket, vastly illuminated by new floodlights on poles around the fence and on the corners of the building. It seemed very sheltered in the dark square of the roof, a safe place to stroll, to watch the world without being seen; the only sounds a scattering of gravel across the tarred roof from your feet or a gentle thump as a rice bug discovered its fate against the brick wall below the beckoning lights. A pleasant and roomy crow’s nest but with very little to spy upon — the spying went on below. The fences, the gate, the parked three-quarter, and fifty yards of
cogon
grass. Occasionally a small pig might be glimpsed racing across the thirty-yard swath cut around the fence, but where the grass wasn’t cut, it waved higher than a man’s hopes and anything you chose to see out there was a ghost of your own construction. A patch of darkness in a square of light in an eternity of darkness in a hole in the bottom of the sea. To the right in the distance were the lights of the Main Gate, to the left those of the Central Exchange, and behind were the dancing colored lights of the runways, dipping to the swinging baton of the endless beacon. But these were only lights, distant cold dots without the warmth of stars. The sullen night was no more pleasing than the eternal daylight below. Even the silence held a gritty whisper, and I walked around to hear the track of my boots and spoke for the sound of my voice, “Got a cigarette, Novotny?”