One to Count Cadence (31 page)

Morning, of course, couldn’t hold his bladder, though he tried, so spent the rest of the night laying in his own waste and stink, cursing the world for that waste and stink. Damn, it had always been this way. Expelled from school for someone else’s smoke in the John; whipped by his mother for the kid next door’s lies; punished at random for the sins of others, he took to sins of his own, smoking, lying to his mother, and he was never caught.

The next day he found himself charged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and, yes, defacing city property. Morning pleaded not guilty and asked for a lawyer, but the justice of the peace said guilty without looking up, dismissed the resisting charge, sentenced him to two hundred dollars or two months in jail. Morning shouted appeal, but the justice of the peace told him no appeal was allowed for misdemeanors in that state.

Morning settled himself for two months, though he had the money in the bank, but the city called his mother. It seemed they’d rather have the money than Mrs. Morning’s son. She paid the fine that afternoon, and as she walked out to the street with him, she asked, “Joe, Joe, what
are
you going to do next? What are you going to do?” He walked away without speaking.

Back in his room he found a note from the assistant dean of men, asking him to leave school. Morning ran still stinking and dirty to the dean’s office up the quiet, pleasant, shaded hill, but the dean refused to see him, saying, in a precise Tidewater voice, You’re not one of our students; our students are Southern gentlemen; please leave my office.

“Southern gentlemen suck cock,” he said, and left the office.

He drank the rest of the afternoon in the cool basement. The chapter president sent a pledge to tell Mr. Morning to please move out of the room, but Mr. Morning sent the pledge back up to tell Mr. President to come down to try to make him do anything. Mr. President didn’t come, but the vice-president did: Jack, Morning’s high school buddy buggered by the two farmers that night after they had lost the state championship. He stood in the open door, his face composed, ready for the pitch, acting as if he had forgotten the hate of that night, acting as if he were big enough, as he had said, to forgive and forget, stood there in loafers, gray slacks, a crew-neck sweater, for the winter chill still clung in Morning’s basement though spring had come two weeks before.

“Joe, boy, what’s the matter with you? Where did you go wrong?” He had been taking business psychology. “You came down here a football star, a stable, straight, clean guy. Then you quit football, the thing you do best of all, calling it stupid, throwing away all those hours of intense preparation. Boy, you better believe, if I could have played as well as you, I would have never quit. But you quit, threw all that God-given talent away. Then you moved down in this dirty basement, down to this damp dirty room with all your fine library of books stinking with mold, and this place stinks like a… a… a nigger whorehouse,” he said as Morning tossed a pair of stained panties at his feet. “You bring girls down here, and to the parties, you wouldn’t want your mother to meet. And you haven’t had a hair cut, till now, since God knows when. And you sit down in Mickey’s with those damned pinkos. Joe, I don’t know, I just don’t know. I know you’re good inside, but the things the brothers say about you. Sometimes it hurts me real bad to hear them.” While he talked, Jack had been carefully removing mildewed books and dirty clothes from a chair. He sat down, clasped his hands in front of a knee, and said, “And this hurts me most of all, Joe. The chapter voted you out this morning. Mind you, we can’t vote you out of the national body. I mean once you are a member of this fraternity, you are a member for life, just like when you joined the church. But they can vote you out of the house. I talked for you, but in a case like this an officer just has one vote, too. It really hurts me, Joe. We been together a long time. I just don’t know.”

“Morning out in the morning,” he chanted. “Tell my brethren I’ll be come ‘fore daylight charms their ruddy cheeks. You’re gonna make a wonderful junior executive, Jack, you know that?”

“Joe, boy, what’s gone wrong?” Jack asked again, his voice and face soft in professional concern. He fooled a drunk Morning.

So Morning tried to answer him as he lay back among the twisted, dirty sheets, looking vacantly up at the poster of an intent Lenin pasted on the low ceiling, but after a moment when he looked over at Jack’s bored, dumb face, he snorted, then said with a smile, “Jack, baby, let’s talk about you. I mean what’s wrong with you, son? I know how you acted when them farm boys corn-holed you, I remember that, but they told me you loved it, and wouldn’t let them stop. And your roommate been looking kinda peaked lately…”

“You son of a bitch,” Jack said, standing up. “You bastard, I should have killed you that night.”

“That’s right, bugger, ‘cause you sure as hell can’t do it now. They fucked the guts out of you that night.”

Jack sought the dirtiest curse he could think of: “You damned Communist.”

Morning laughed and laughed, wild, happy roars that drove Jack from the room, across the basement, and up the stairs, and might still drive him wherever he may be. “Better Commie than queer, Jackshit.” He laughed until in that quickly, for him, vanishing point between pleasure and pain, he found tears falling on his dirty hands, sobs raw in his throat, and a great lonely hole growing inside, the hole he drank into all the night long.

* * *

The next morning he felt, as he always did when chance laid him open to the world’s fateful arrows and errors, that not only his civil, but even more his moral rights had been played with fast and loose by the minor officials of the various legalities he was subject to, fraternal, academic, municipal. In his drunken way he was going to demand redress, even if that redress would cost him in the same careless way: he was born to be a loser. Loser or not, though, he presented himself before the steps of the college administration building at eight o’clock in the morning, neatly dressed, shaved, clean, wearing the slacks, sweater, loafer uniform of his fellow men, and carrying a neatly lettered sign which said simply, as Morning said all his days, I PROTEST, meaning merely that he was protesting the world’s treatment of him.

The administration had learned from other protests the best defense: they quietly, calmly ignored him in the way a father ignores his errant infant son. The administration was also in the process of ignoring four young Negroes who came each day with signs to protest the segregation rules of the college. The administration, adept at ignorance, also paid no mind to the eight or ten football players who appeared each morning at ten o’clock to formally spit on the Negroes who, if they blinked at this, were left curled in silent pain on the clean sidewalk, or dropped on the carefully clipped grass, or stretched over a neat hedge. But this was to be a different morning.

Just as the first Negro fell, the tall lean hungry end from north Alabama who had hit him found himself falling as Joe Morning landed square with both feet in the middle of his back. Morning became all feet and elbows, his frenzy the madness of righteousness, his strength that of surprise and holy anger, and the infidels fell about him in waves, and if he could have them away from his ribs, he might have stood them off until sweet darkness. As it was, he made them forfeit such an unholy price for his defeat that they left the other three Negroes alone that day, and from that day let the Negroes protest in peace.

So for the second time in three days, Morning woke beaten and bleeding slightly on that thin mattress, which still held the stink of his waste, bound and chained again, though on his back this time. Ah, even the fuzz is wearing thin, growing soft, he thought as he woke, and smiled, then touched his tongue to the stiff stitches in his split lip. Holy rage had eased the bitterness. He felt as clean as the lamb, washed in his own blood, but clean nonetheless, and he sang happy songs until he was released at five.

A civil-rights organization had bailed him out, and a sweet-faced, collegiate-looking cat from Cornell thanked him for his zeal and love, but chided him for resorting to violence, then bought him a beer. Partly because he wanted to throw it at his mother, partly because he needed a place to rest, but mostly because he was enchanted by this soft-spoken chocolate cat with a touch of a Yankee twang, Morning moved with the Negro into a small room off the war room in the basement of a Negro church. “Basements again,” Morning said, “Always the lower depths for me,” with laughter. He refused at first to even allow that non-violence had any positive possibilities; his plan was to bring the bluebellies back down the Mississippi, then let them march dreadfully to the sea, burning crops of white men in their wake. But Richard, the Negro, refused even to allow Morning to sing with them until he at least intellectually acknowledged that non-violence was the way, for now. So Morning did, mentally preparing himself for being spat upon and called niggerlover, but Richard sent him to a man in East St. Louis who then sent Morning and his guitar and his discontent off with a fund-raising group around Mid-Western and Western college campuses. So Morning sang with a Southern accent, and worked, and lived off checks sent secretly by his father instead of taking expenses from the organization, and he worked well except for a few lost weekends, or week days, depending on his moods. It was on one of these dark times, wandering about hilly San Francisco in the fog, that he stepped into the nightclub where sang the man called Linda Charles, and first acknowledged his fear.

But he forgot, as best as Joe Morning ever forgot anything, during the heat of the next summer. He marched in Birmingham, sat-in in Tampa, sang all over the Southland, sang about freedom, and all the while bound by his love for violence, and every step closely watched by Richard. He had to grab Morning in Tampa when a skinny deputy spit his chaw on them, but he couldn’t have held Morning alone. Morning held part of himself, and he made it through the summer.

In the fall he drifted to Phoenix with a chick he had worked with, and he lived off her and his guitar until January, then went back to the fund-raising scene. In San Francisco he stayed away from the club where he had seen the shimmering vision of Linda Charles, stayed away until he became conscious of his absence, then he went, sober, sweating, but she wasn’t playing there. Relieved, he went in to exorcise her (him), and found himself enjoying the show. It
was
funny, and did
poke
at the hypocrisy of middle-class America. And professional too, said the guy at the next table who said, and who looked the part, that he had just retired as a 49er defensive lineman. “These guys aren’t queer. They’re just actors trying to make a living. That one guy there,” he said, pointing to a slim stripper, “has got six kids out in San Mateo.” After the show he and Morning went down to Chinatown, drinking together until the ham-handed bear of a bastard made a clumsy pass at him. Morning swung on him, but the guy lowered his head, and Morning broke his hand. He ran like the wind, pulling over barstools behind him, and escaped with his life and virtue intact.

The old doctor who set the bones that night gave Morning a long lecture on the vices of the world. “The devil wears many faces, son, many masks. Be forever on guard. Tempt him not for his strength is the strength of ten men,” he said, forming the cast with white hands connected to thin arms on which all the veins had collapsed from shooting. “Tempt him not. That will be twenty-seven fifty,” he said, but Morning ran out of the emergency room, shouting, “The devil wears many masks, old man,” diabolical laughter falling behind him as he ran. (Six months later he mailed a check to the old doctor, but the old doctor mailed it right back with a short note, “Son, I know what the devil costs. You’ll need this more than I.”)

“Why do things always happen to me?” Morning asked Richard the next summer. “Why me?” and Richard answered, “They happen to all of us, man, so just stay cool.” But coolness wasn’t Morning’s long suit, so Richard refused to let him demonstrate. Morning, in anger, moved to a more militant organization, and on the first sit-in of the summer at a dime-store lunch counter in Birmingham, he laid low a nineteen-year-old kid who only said Pass the salt, niggerlover. Then the kid’s buddies moved in, and Morning left the civil-rights movement the same way he entered, swinging and kicking for holy hell.

Charged with felonious assault, Morning faced one to three years, but his mother, faithful Southern mother, had a cousin (in the South one has cousins everywhere) who shot pool with the judge. So instead of three years, he was exiled from Alabama, in effect. The charges were indefinitely postponed, but the case would be reopened if he crossed into Alabama to demonstrate for anything ever.

The anger he held for the judge’s sentencing, he held until he was outside. Once again he walked away from his mother without a word, stopped long enough for his guitar and a flight bag, then, anger still his only impulse, he walked from downtown, out 3rd, all the way to the city limits before he stuck out his thumb pointed toward Phoenix. But anger doesn’t lend itself to hitching rides: the action is too slow, the long waits while asphalt puffs in the sun and the sparse shade of a jackpine protects neither man nor angry beast against the hot, dusty winds trailing semi’s. The time after midnight, which may be the witching hour but ain’t the hitching hour, he stood at lonely crossroads, stood for hours that never end, then ran from side to side from road to road at the call of the headlights booming up through East Texas piney woods, hoping only for a ride to anywhere, and again the semi’s roaring past like fast freights. Then the afternoon sun like lava on rocky West Texas hills and a man makes the only shade there is, fatigue and dust and sunburn like a mask eating his face, until finally he hasn’t even a damn for the arrogant cars hissing past, slinging gravel at his hot feet. Then Phoenix rising in the heat waves as he watched from the back of a cotton-picker truck filled with Mexicans, and he was ready to lay his burden down.

Four cold beers at his old girl’s place, then he fell into his first long sleep. He slept for days, thirteen to be exact, in her bed, rising only to relieve himself or swill a glass of tepid water. But not so much sleeping, he said, but dreaming of sleep and dreams. He ran dreams like movies with intermissions for a leak, then right back to the film — war, honor, love, the past, the future — running until it seemed his brain could contain no more images, yet still going on like a bad Italian movie. Frightened, the girl called a doctor who merely sedated Morning into real sleep for another twelve hours, then told the girl to throw a glass of cold water into his face the next morning. He came up angry again, and was all right.