One to Count Cadence (45 page)

* * *

Well, old war horse, I’ve written pretty often in the past year or so, but haven’t had much chance to mail a letter. The postal service out here isn’t so great.

It’s been tough. I know you told me it would be, and I believed you, but you were right, I didn’t know.

It’s not the fighting, not at all, in fact I look forward to a fire-fight now days, and I see them often now days too. The army is right behind us all the time now and it is only a matter of time. That phrase works in lots of ways — time weighs more than the base plate of a mortar or five hundred rounds of belted thirty caliber ammo. You didn’t tell me about all the time I would spend sitting on my ass under a banana tree, you didn’t tell me lots of things…

I’m hard now, man, hard. In spite of the food, I’ve filled out; got my growth, as you’d say. I steal vitamins whenever I can and, though I can’t laugh about it, I know that you do, laugh at the picture of the great revolutionary dashing through the jungles with a bottle of One-a-Day brand vitamins in his pocket. I’m as brown as a gook now, but I’m not one, and they remind me every day. They kept all the shit for me, cooking, washing dishes, until I busted one up who asked me to wipe his ass. God, they’re nearly all as dumb as old Dottlinger. They’d rather collect taxes from poor gooks like themselves than rob American bases. They’re shit. I guess I’m shit too now. Three days ago I gut-shot an old man who spit on me. He sat in the sun for a long time with his guts in his arms, till I shot him, not out of compassion but out of disgust. Hard.

But somehow easier too. I wish you’d go see my parents, man, tell them that I’m sorry, that I love them (at least the memory of them), and that if I could find a way, I would come home. Don’t tell them I’m dead.

But then the hardness is back. I guess you’ll get this while teaching at some fat-ass girls’ college in the North. The army has been on our tails for four months and I haven’t slept much and haven’t eaten much and I think maybe I’ve killed a thousand men and I don’t even know why. I haven’t eaten beef since I saw you last, haven’t had many beers, and don’t even know why. I’m not crying, man, because I did what I thought was right, I did it, while most men sit on their fat asses not even caring about right, and though I’m hungry and I’ve got sores all over my legs and my left arm doesn’t work too well since I caught a bullet last May, I know I’m a man now. I don’t worry about that. I’m only sorry that there wasn’t an easier way.

There isn’t much else to say. I just wanted you to know that I loved you, old horse, and that I was a fool. I’m not crying, man, but it’s been tough, and I won’t be sorry when it is over.

Your friend,

Joe Morning

A note came with the letter, saying that this American had said that I might send one hundred American dollars to the person who sent this letter to me. I didn’t do it.

* * *

I’m glad I was in bed when the letter came, though I’m not glad to be in bed again. God, the images rush back. Morning running for the latrine with his ass bobbing white in Dottlinger’s face, the mutiny, crying over the dead Huk he wouldn’t spit on six months later. And the things he told me. Fighting on the university lawn, fighting in Birmingham, fighting. But the picture that hangs with me: Morning roaring out of that van on Hill 527, desperate, romantic, mad with hate, sick with hate, breaking the back of the attack with one fine last gesture, so fine, so fatal that it seems a shame he didn’t die there while he still believed in his hate, seems a shame. But he didn’t. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how he died, but I’m sure it was dirty and painful and impossible to bear, and I’m certain he bore it well.

* * *

It has been tough all over, though. After I drank my way back to Texas after my discharge, after I dried out for a few weeks, after I lost Ell again, I did go to Africa, silly as it may sound, but I met a CIA man in Johannesburg before I could hire out. I told him, when he offered me a job over two warm beers, that I didn’t care who I killed for, just so the pay was good and the action often. He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t contradict me either. They sent me through Special Forces training at Bragg, then to language school at Monterrey, then to northern Thailand. An Army major and I slipped into Laos, periodically, to train Meo tribes to resist invasion from the north. Unfortunately we couldn’t train them not to sell us out to the North Vietnamese regulars operating along the edge of the Plain of Jars. They must have believed in capitalism, because three different times the major and I ran out of one end of a burning Montagnard village as the North Vietnamese hardhats ran in the other. The third time the major didn’t make it and I took a teacup full of shrapnel in my ass then ran three miles, mostly downhill, to the airstrip. And now I’m home again, on my ass, wondering how it all happened, how it will end, why it always happens to me…

But that’s Morning’s line, isn’t it, not mine, but then his letter, sadly, sounded more like me than him…

The mortar round would have killed me this time but for an old Meo woman who stumbled as I ran past, faltered and took the steel meant for me. Pieces of her flesh stuck to the back of my shirt and when I found them on the U-10 flying out, I threw up. The pilot bitched and I told what had happened and he said, “No sweat. Just a fucking old gook broad.” When we landed at the base camp back in Thailand, I broke his jaw with my rifle butt before he could get out and lost another government job.

* * *

But Joe Morning is dead now, probably, unless the letter fell out of his pocket. Even if he isn’t dead, he is surely lost, and that makes me sad. I don’t know who to blame, I just don’t know who to blame.

* * *

When I left Oakland the day after Kennedy died, I drank my way across the Rockies and over to Nebraska. In a service station, the attendant-owner told me that the last owner had been killed by one of those crazy teen-agers in cheap store-bought cowboy boots who spawn in the heartland with nickel-plated .38s and thin excited girls hanging on their arms. The attendant-owner said business had been pretty good. Over in Iowa, I’m told, each spring when the rains fall like Noah’s flood, a farmer murders his family with an axe, then hangs himself in the barn like a side of beef. As I passed through Missouri, a man killed his dog, which isn’t notable, except that he had spent seven years teaching the dog to yodel. In Oklahoma, twenty-two migrant workers were killed when their truck plunged into the Washita River; passers-by picked their empty pockets before the highway patrol came. And in Dallas…

* * *

We’ve come a long way and the sadness is heavy. Gallard and Abigail finally married and are working for AID in South Vietnam. I saw them in Saigon last year, and though they both still loved me, I had been with the killing too long and made them nervous. Cagle and Novotny have both married, fathered children and prospered, but they both drink too much and talk about war when I see them. Saunders stepped on a mine in the Ia Drang Valley this last summer and died six weeks later at Walter Reed. Tetrick retired two years ago, early, and is drinking himself to death in Grand Island, Nebraska. He told me, when I last saw him, that Dottlinger was doing six to ten in Leavenworth for hot checks. I’m thirty-one years old and sleeping in my father’s house again, for now, and don’t know what to do, except echo Morning: It’s been tough, man, but I’m not crying, and it’s not, it’s for damn sure not, over yet.

It is November again, and the gray wind and the rain weave at my window. The Mexican Pacific beaches are lovely this time of year, and I’m going there to rest, to drink a little, to eat the sun and dream Joe Morning’s dream for awhile. Then I’ll be back.

James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and spent most of his childhood in south Texas. He served three years as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. Over the years, he has taught at the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Montana, and the University of Arkansas. Mr. Crumley, who summers in Missoula, Montana, has recently published
The Mexican Tree Duck.