One to Count Cadence (8 page)

“You’re quite correct, sir. Not that particular problem.”

“Well, goodnight, sergeant. Ah, and don’t neglect the major’s desk.”

“No, sir. The major’s desk. Yes, sir.”

As the heavy door slammed behind Dottlinger, Cagle slipped from his chair and up the ladder as quickly as a monkey to let him out the gate, then lowered Franklin through the trap. He was still out. Novotny lodged him in his chair and slapped his face with cold water until he came around. He woke, mumbling, “Fuck ‘em, goddamnit, fuck ‘em,” then staggered to the latrine. He returned in better shape, his eyes puffy but awake and a silly grin on his face.

“Jesus Christ, it’s four-thirty,” he said, stretching his arms and yawning. As he rubbed the back of his neck, he found a few pieces of gravel. “Hey, where’d this come from?” Novotny explained. “You guys did that for me? Jesus…” He started to say something smart, then stopped. “Jesus. Thanks… Thanks.” He started to cry, bewildered tears. “Nobody ever …” He stammered, then sat down and put his headsets on.

I put things in order, caught up the hourly log, then grabbed a can of wax, a mop and the buffer out of the utility closet. I took an hour on the major’s floor, waxing and buffing until the tile was as shining hard and brittle as my anger.

When I went back upstairs, everything was clean and glistening except the floor, and Franklin was waiting for the mop and buffer. “I’m sorry, sarge,” he said, taking the gear from me, “I promise you, if it ever happens again, I’ll turn myself in. Promise. Thanks.”

“Don’t sweat it, kid. It won’t happen again,” I said, admiring the immaculate room.
You, Krummel, you got troubles?
A Trick-ful. It was different now, easier and more relaxed, like a family, now that I had pulled Franklin into the Trick by his shirt front, stepping into the living room myself. We knew where we stood, for better or worse: together.

* * *

But Joe Morning and I were friends from the beginning. Perhaps it was as simple as two men just liking the look of each other, or as complex as covering hate with love. We looked somewhat alike, enough so that we often passed for brothers in Town, except for our coloring, Joe fair and I dark, and our noses, mine hooked and crooked as sin, his straight as an arrow. I affected a ferocious, drooping moustache, and Morning his scholarly spectacles. We stood the same six feet, but I was thirty pounds heavier than his 195, and I suppose it was the size which started us.

“You ever play any football, Sgt. Krummel?” he asked on his fourth trip to the coffee pot that first morning at work. I could tell he wanted to say something, to start a conversation, but he didn’t, so I waited.

“I played a little in college.”

“Where?”

I told him. He had heard of the small South Texas school. They had been NAIA contenders two seasons before.

“You play on that team?” he asked.

“No. I was at the University of Washington by then.” We went through the routine about what I was doing in the Army, and then I pulled a quick history out of him. (Actually no one ever had to pull anything out of Morning. He told everything, which is a nice way to lie.)

He had been born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but spent his first ten years or so in Phoenix, then back to Spartanburg for the rest of high school. He went to a large Southern university as a single-wing tail-back and Accounting major until he changed to drinking and Philosophy in his second semester, which he continued until he was expelled in his junior year. Then he commuted between Phoenix where he sang folk songs in a bar and the South where he sang in demonstrations, until, so he said, an Alabama judge, at Mrs. Momma Morning’s request, sentenced him to three years in prison or the Army on an assault charge. Morning had forgotten how to passively resist. He took the Army as the greater of two evils, gave the judge as a reference on his security clearance application, and after nine months at Fort Carlton, he came to the 721st. (The Alabama judge bit was only half a lie, and Joe Morning told it with such skill and a great ability to laugh at his troubles, that everyone, including me, believed it. Only Quinn ever suspected, and he was crazy. Even as I know the truth, I still think Morning told a fine story.)

Morning was open and friendly with me from the start, as he was with nearly everyone, but I never knew quite what to make of him in the early days. Surely he hated the world order, the capitalist system, the American miscarriage of democracy, the slavery of the Army, the Philippines, Clark Air Base and the 721st; but not necessarily in that order, because his moods would change. But I don’t think he hated any single man. He would rail for hours against Southerners, but would defend the other Southerner on our Trick, Collins, to any and all comers. But to the South in general he shouted, “Freedom Now! Fuck understanding your particular problems!” It was the same with Filipinos: he thought them thieving, sneaky bastards. But each trick he risked a court martial for some Filipino private he didn’t even know. Morning hated Christians, particularly Catholics, but he would defend the Catholic Church against the accusation of holding back education three hundred years during the Middle Ages; and he probably knew his Bible better than any man I knew, but he hid his knowledge, and only shouted verses of damnation when he was crazy drunk. His friends never knew quite where he stood, but they did know that Joe Morning would do anything they asked, and seldom ask anything of them. When he did, it was with such great shyness that no one could refuse him. He was thoughtful to boot and kind in the bargain, and easily forgave the thoughtless and unkind acts of his friends. He could be cruel, moody, but he endured these things with a wry, self-effacing humor which took the bite out of the bitterness. Ordinarily he was a happy, perfect drunk, but once each month or so, he would lose control in a wild, insane night, and cry and fight and scream and beat his head on the floor till no one knew who or what he was…

Such was Joe Morning, Joseph Jabez Morning, hanging between the sun and the moon, a man of great tides. Like all men without roots, direction or patience, he was a revolutionary, not a rebel but a revolutionary, a destroyer, a reacher for all or nothing for anyone. (It would be easier, so much easier, this history I record, if Joe Morning could have been a bad man, an evil heart, but he was good, and in his misguided virtue drove me to the evil of excess and even to murder, and in the end passed the avenging, burning, falling stone of revolution to me.)

* * *

He came to me the morning of Franklin’s salvation and asked, “Sgt. Krummel, the Trick is having a Roll Call in Town today, if you’d like to come.” Roll Calls were for the men, and no trick chiefs allowed unless asked by the men.

“Thank you. I’d like that.”

By the time I ate and walked up to my room, the Trick had already changed out of their uniforms and gathered in my room.

“What’s the hurry? I’m going to shower first,” I drawled.

“Shower!” they screamed. “What are you? a preacher? You don’t shower before you go to Town!”

Outvoiced, I reached in the closet for a pair of slacks.

“What are you? Got a date or something? You don’t wear slacks to Town.” They were dressed in Town clothes, that is, everything from shoes to shorts which could be ripped, stolen, or shit on for all they cared. I tried a pair of Levi’s.

“What are you, a new guy? No Levi’s, no blue jeans off base!”

I took another pair, light brown, a knit shirt and a pair of buff Wellingtons, and sat them on the table. “Okay, troops, out,” I said, opening the door. “You just wait in the Orderly Room, I’ll be right down. As soon as I shit, shower, and shave.”

They grumbled, but they left, and were waiting in the Day Room, playing pool and shuffleboard when I came down.

“So you’re lovely, Sarge,” Cagle said, “but Town is all used up by now.” It was 0745.

“I hear you’re going to Town,” Tetrick said from behind his desk. He handed me the sheaf of three-day passes. “Make ‘em sign out.” His face was pale and bloated from a hangover, but he smiled. “They’ll take care of you until you can take care of them. I hope. But watch yourselves. Capt. Saunders is going stateside for six weeks, and Lt. Dottlinger will have the Company. He don’t like guys who go to Town. So stay clean.

“You guys don’t let him fall in love,” Tetrick shouted as we left.

Lt. Dottlinger was coming in, his OD armband still crinkling his shirt sleeve, as we tumbled out front to wait for the cabs to take us to the gate. He answered our quick salutes with a crisp touch of ball-point pen to cap bill and a grim, brimstone eye.

* * *

Angeles, in spite of its reputation as a minor version of heaven, was a collection of bamboo huts, wooden, tin-roofed buildings, dusty streets, open sewers, and seventy-five or eighty bars. It wasn’t quite as modern as a Mexican border town, which it very much resembled, nor as dirty as a large city slum. The streets always seemed festive in a way, filled with people, dogs and pigs wandering without the help of crosswalks or traffic lights. I liked the look of the people. They were cleaner than I had been led to expect, and without that wolfish, greedy glare of the citizens of Columbus, Georgia or Fayetteville, North Carolina or Kileen, Texas.

Our cabs stopped in the center of Town where five streets intersected. Three kiosks were around the plaza, three of the half-dozen or so enclosed ones. The others, and there seemed to be hundreds spotted around Town, were open to the weather. It was explained to me that kiosks were for serious drinking, since the barmaids were indecently nice and wouldn’t even meet an American eye on the street. The whores were in the bars or in houses. Trick Two, my Trick, usually gathered at the Plaza.

We filed into the narrow, high room, jammed ourselves around an elongated horseshoe bar on small, hard bamboo stools. Venetian blinds held off the early morning sun around one long and one short side, and three Edwardian fans ladled the air above the bar, buzzing and stirring as much breeze as fat, lazy blowflies. A huge hulk of chrome and plastic commanded the scene from a niche high in the end wall, contentedly bubbling, watching over her foolish children.

“Roll Call, mama-san,” Morning said to the large, middle-aged owner of the Plaza.

“Aaiiieeee,” she giggled, taking her glasses off. “Take business to Chew Chi’s.” She sat her glasses back on her face as if they might protect her as Trick Two sat down.

“Too early,” said a heart-faced girl behind the bar. Her smile exposed a front tooth circled in gold-fill which formed a small, white heart on her tooth. She and two other girls gave everyone a cold, thick San Miguel and a utilitarian tumbler of such thickness it might be used for anything from weapon to anchor — and it was. Beers were neatly poured, then Morning pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, and began:

“In so much as this is a world we didn’t make, filled with dangers we refuse to understand, we of Trick Two do hereby withdraw ourselves from the arms race, the space race, and the human race for these next three days; and being the finest of fellows, comrades and carousers, humbly raise our glasses in defiance and bow our heads in shame, and here do solemnly swear (or affirm) to drink until the moon falls from the heavens, the heavens on our heads, or we, fat chance, on our asses.

“Agreed?”

“Aye!”

“I shall read the roll of the honored and infamous alike.”

“Thomas Earl Novotny,” Morning intoned.

“Aye,” growled Novotny, then stood and poured the beer down his throat.

(Novotny, the cowboy, hated the Army so bad that when he made Specialist Fifth Class he would change out of uniform rather than eat in the NCO mess area. But he was a good soldier. Perhaps he just didn’t like people telling him what to do.)

“John Christopher Cagle.” He choked halfway down, but finished his glass.

(Cagle, the monkey, the dancer, the nervous mover. His father was a chaplain, a major in the Air Force who believed, according to Cagle, God to be a combination between General Eisenhower and General Motors. “That Great Used Car Salesman in the sky,” Cagle used to sing. He had been expelled from Indiana University his senior year for trying to break into the Kinsey Institute of Sexual Research’s pornographic collection, and had been in trouble ever since. The Company had long since given him up so long as he hurt no one but himself and his eyebrows. His greatest triumph came when he returned from thirty days’ leave in Japan. He stepped off the plane wearing a Japanese private’s uniform, carrying a samurai sword and sporting a goatee. But he never told anyone how he got on that plane.)

“Doyle Quinn.”

“Ha!” Quinn shouted, “Now the serious drinkin’ begins!” and tossed down his beer.

(Quinn. His steady shack, Dottie the bowlegged whore, cared for him and hid his shoes so he would be faithful, but nothing worked, so she tried suicide from the second floor of a nipa hut and became Dottie the bowlegged whore. But none of this made the slightest impression on Quinn. He was a sly, dark Irishman from the City, tough and wild, never caring if the sun came up. A false tooth set in his jaw had been broken in a fight, leaving only the gray, metallic core, and Quinn didn’t bother to have it fixed. Born to streets and alleys, poverty and race riots, his laughter had acquired a stony, mocking edge to it which said, “I’ve seen the whole mess and I don’t give a shit for it, so let’s have another.”)

“David Douglas Franklin.”

“Ha!” he snorted and snarled like his idol, Quinn.

(His parents thought they had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital, and in shame never had another. Mr. Franklin was a typewriter repairman and his wife cashiered in a restaurant in Bristol, Connecticut, and their son had an IQ upwards of immeasurability. They prevented him from reading until he was four by slapping the
Reader’s Digest
out of his hands. They thought he wanted to tear out the pages. They hid him in a back room when friends came to play bridge because he always won. Once they discovered that he wasn’t a freak, Franklin went on display throughout the neighborhood. He finished eight years of school in two, then missed four years because he wouldn’t go, then two more because he failed when they made him attend school, but managed to finish with his original class which was all he wanted, anyway. His father’s finest moment came as he decked the school psychologist for suggesting that the child might have family troubles. I once heard Franklin say, “I rather be dumb than have acne.”)