One to Count Cadence (2 page)

“Not anytime. You’re an evil-minded enlisted man and I’m an officer and a gentleman,” she said with a bit of a smile. But then back to business: “You sure you’re all right?” She turned to leave as I nodded, and the hesitant way she carried her head struck me again. I wanted to straighten that back and lift that delicate face to the sun.

“One more thing,” I said.

“Yes?” she asked very solemnly. She could change so quickly. Like all defenseless things, she was too ready to be hurt.

“Your name?”

She smiled again, and then did it perfectly, never thinking Lt. Light would be enough. “Abigail Light.”

“Abby?”

“No.”

“Gail?”

“No. Abigail,” she said with a flip of her head, smiled again as if pleased by the sound of her name, then left. She had spoken her name in an old-fashioned way, musically important and not to be cheapened by a nickname, a name from a time when names mattered. Abigail Light. How much nicer than mine, I thought, mine which resembled an ominous rumble of thunder on a spring day. Jacob Slagsted Krummel. Slag Krummel.

I lay back in bed. My body, so lately and violently taught its vulnerability, forgot the pain, the violation. I stretched against the aches and pains of inactivity, scratched some of the smaller scabs on my right side, and decided I would live after all.

I examined my surroundings: my room; those sour walls; an uninviting porcelain-enamel framed bed, complete with an array of mechanical devices to push, pull, twist and turn, so that it might have been a place to get sick rather than well; two windows on the west wall, raised halfway and partly covered by age-yellowed roller shades, with panes of glass too clean to be less than sharp.

Out the windows is another story. In the distance sits the city of Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines, a multi-colored maze spread over half a dozen soft hills. Much nearer, lodged at the edge of a rise, is the Halfway House, a low and massive log building with an umbrella-spotted terrace slightly behind the ninth green. The tenth and eleventh fairways are across the road to the left, but I can’t see them, nor the twelfth, and only the back edge of the thirteenth green because all this is hidden by the rise on which the fourteenth tee sits. The fourteenth fairway is straight with a slight down-slope for two hundred yards, then the plane of the land tilts left for the next one hundred yards just where a well-hit slice will run downhill into the evergreen rain-forest mixture of rough. Then the fairway is level for another thirty yards to where the raised green is banked against the side of the hill with two small traps at the fore-lip. (I once drove the right-hand trap with a good drive and lots of downhill run, but Morning thought I had paid my caddie to drop the ball there. He always was a hard man to convince.) There is a road about twenty yards above the green, and a graveled path on this side of the road leading directly toward my window. The path forks between the road and the hospital, one fork leading toward the hospital past my window, and the other toward the fifteenth tee off to the right. No one seems to walk toward my window, though.

My nostalgic lingering over the view was not without reason. There had been times when that small golf course had been our only refuge. We would come up when the heat and debaucheries of the plain had clogged our spirits, up to the mountains, to the sun and the afternoon rains. Cool air and solitude, fresh vegetables and virtue, golf and moderation, and the mountains stretching toward the sky. These things had brought peace to us then — but I wondered if they could pacify me now, now that I was alone with my memory, my history, now pinned with a wing I couldn’t carry.

Less than three months before, Cagle, Novotny, Morning and I had stood on that very circle of green which so occupied me when I saw it again, stood healthy and laughing as the sun ate the morning mists. And as I thought of them, the sudden life in my veins became quick guilt, and all I had to do to see them again was close my eyes.

Black and white, black and white, stark black and
white. A negative world undeveloped by dawn. A roar of all sounds lashed into one and no single cry can lift its pleading arm above the clamor. Novotny’s healthy tan now blasted gray, his fatigues still starched, but he has a crazy black part through his stiff white hair. Cagle, small hairy body dancing in skivvy shorts, jerk, step, jerk, jerk, as blood spurts from his chest. And Joe Morning, Joe Morning, his strong length folding forward in a quick nervous bow as if someone important had just ended his life.

I opened my eyes and they were gone, and they were there, and there was not a thing I could do about it. I slept.

* * *

A nurse and a Filipino orderly woke me at ten for a bed-change and a whore’s bath. They managed to do it without making me pass out from the pain. The clean sheets were stiff and cool against my back, and the bath had left me feeling clean for a change. I might be clean, but my right leg, after two weeks in a cast, smelled as if it had crawled in there to die. I asked for a barber and, oddly enough, one came from the hospital shop. He cleared away the stubble, trimmed my moustache and gave me a haircut.

Clean, shaven and rested, I refused to remember, and thought life would be wonderful if I could get a drink. In my nightstand drawer were several letters, one from my father with a fifty-dollar money order in it. I just glanced at the letter, catching a few lines here and there, something about his understanding that I wouldn’t have any money in the hospital. It seemed that some rear-guard orderly in Cherbourg had stolen his money when he had come back from Bastogne with pneumonia in December of ‘44. Whatever his reason, Thank God, I thought, because I didn’t have any money.

Lt. Light cashed it for me on her lunch hour, then I collared the orderly when he came back to pick up my lunch tray. He squirmed and complained a bit, then became so businesslike that I knew this was a regular business. I gave him enough scrip for a black-market fifth of Dewar’s, and promised him another five when he brought it to my window that evening.

With nothing to do all afternoon except wait for that magic bottle, I read my mail. One was from my ex-wife, and opened with a small chapter on how nice it was that we were able to be friends even after our divorce — which wasn’t quite true, but it sounded nice when she told her friends. Then she chatted about all the fine work she was
involved
in among the Negro population of Mississippi. She spoke of Mississippi as if it were Madagascar, but I knew that in spite of the fashionable nature of her “idealistic commitment” as she called it, she was really a good-hearted woman in the best sense of the word, and most of the time I was sorry that she had left me. She also managed to hope that I wouldn’t get mixed up in that mess in Vietnam, and quoted the objections of a brilliant and dedicated young man she worked under. I wasn’t quite so sorry after all. She had been writing me for almost two years now, telling me how she suffered for my bitterness and bias, but she wasn’t about to give up, even if I never answered. In a drunk moment some months before, I had dropped her a postcard with one word on it, “Nigger-lover,” but I had forgotten to address it. I often wondered who received it; it was a photo of a Negrito pygmy.

My father’s letter was the usual thing: it had or hadn’t rained, and the ranch was or wasn’t doing well; one of my younger brothers had done something to make him wonder why a man bothered to continue the family name (this time Claude, the youngest, had tried to ride a Brahma bull in a rodeo, and had been hooked in the mouth before he got out of the chute, and the old man had to cough up two hundred bucks for a dental bill, and that reminded him, parenthetically, of my first and last, ha, attempt at the bulls, when that bastard bull, named Sara Lou for some obscene reason, had eaten my lunch at the Tilden rodeo, cracked half a dozen ribs, broke my left arm, and left me with a four inch half-moon memento on my left cheek, and goddamn hadn’t that been funny); he wished I would get out of the Army because it was a shame to waste my education, but a man had to do what he wanted or never be happy, and the Army wasn’t really so bad, or he didn’t remember it being so. The last thing he mentioned (last so I wouldn’t think I had caused him any grief or worry) was the telegram and letter about me being hurt. It took a while, but I finally understood that he thought I had been injured in an aircraft accident.

An aircraft accident, they were calling it. Well maybe it was. Surely the good old Army brass couldn’t admit that a little bitty batch of Vietcong had dropped in on the 721st Communication Security Detachment and its three-hundred-thousand-dollars worth of equipment on our first night of operation; dropped in and knocked hell out of us. Not even the American Congress was supposed to know we were in Vietnam, so how could the VC know? I didn’t know then how many casualties the 721st had taken, but I had seen enough to know that it had been bad. A plane crash. Shit.

And here I was, shot in the arm and leg by an American first lieutenant three hours after the attack was over. I hadn’t been angry yet, partly because I had done a foolish thing, and partly because I had not thought about it. There were others dead, and I counted myself lucky to be alive, fortunate enough not to bitch about the conditions of being alive. But anger is easier than reflection, so I paced the afternoon remembering every stupid officer I had ever known, and learned to hate them all over again.

After evening chow Ramon and I handled our transaction at the window. I had a snort, then hid the bottle under my pillow, and tried to sleep until taps. I, fool that I was, wanted a peaceful drink without any nosy nurses bothering me.

It must have been three o’clock before I awoke. My leg hurt, my head ached, the scabs on my side itched and my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe. Like a wounded crab I managed to pour a large amount of tepid water on my nightstand and a small swallow in the glass which I drank without drowning. Now was the big moment, the drink I had been waiting for all day. Mellow Scotch to sooth an angry soul. It tasted like shit. Strange how that taste cuts through romantic notions.

I choked on the first swallow and spit half of it on my bedclothes. Three more fast sips, then I rested, waiting for a little numbness. I wondered why I objected to being drugged with drugs, but not with alcohol. Matter of middle-class taste, I supposed. Another sip, then a swallow, then a real man-sized drink. It didn’t make any difference; I still gagged each time. I rested again.

A delicate chill had touched the air, and it seemed too heavy and damp for the mountains. Slight rustlings and tiny chirps like drowsy questions peeped through my window from the two pines. Past the trees a misty fog slept in the hollows, solid and white under the moon, gauzy and glistening beneath the street lamps. I searched the drifting mist, waiting for the Scotch to nudge me into that magic world outside my window, but I quickly began to feel silly: like a midnight rendezvous that doesn’t come off, and by one o’clock you are tired, cold and wish to hell you had never come, and hate the day you met her. And as I thought of a woman, supposing one to be just what I needed, I wondered what a climax in traction might be like. In my shape? Why not? Anything Fredrick Henry can do, I can do better. But then she came, the one I had been waiting for. Pale and delightfully breathless, a virgin reborn in the cobweb tangle of moon in her hair, her mouth opening like a flower under mine… As if by magic I was drunk, the cold air bubbling in my nose, the hot kiss of Scotch in my belly.

For fifteen minutes I laid waste to those fifteen hundred famous virgins whoever they were. Within the next five minutes I banished evil from the house of man, smashing mine enemies with my virtuously white right claw. I shot a little more time trying to say “white right claw.” I had had love, virtue and honor, so I tried wine again, and drank seriously for a while. But it all amounted to — within half an hour I was drunk and bored, securely immobilized, without a soul to talk to me, to see me, or even pity me. Just me, alone in the dark, with half a bottle left and too many hours until dawn. But even boredom lacked constancy. My mind ranged the wide world of all incoherencies. I was grief-stricken and appalled by my survival; then certain that it was only my due as the fittest. There was much guilt, then bountiful thanks, for the death of Joe Morning.

All things are possible on dark mornings, and by the time dawn revealed the troubled corners of my room, I hated, hated Lt. Dottlinger, who I had never liked anyway, and then the bastard shot me… well. I dug a pen from the nightstand drawer and signed my own cast, scrawled FUCK YOU exactly over the hole in my thigh. I wanted to write SLUTFINGER, as Dottlinger was known in the 721st, but was too tired.

Dawn is one thing, daylight another: I had several drinks during the difference. Sleepy groans announced the new day in the wards. All ambulatory patients were being awakened to make their beds and sweep and buff under them. If any managed a hundred-and-one degrees or a traction cast, they could sleep ten minutes longer. I thought this no way to treat sick men, so transferred hates from Dottlinger to the hospital. I was mad. (I say mad, in the literal sense, neither to excuse nor to account for the following adventure.)

Lt. Hewitt came in. Poor Lt. Hewitt carrying her lack of flesh. She was always bright and cheery, her uniform so starched and white it glittered like an angel’s wing, her smile all teeth and well-brushed gums, as if to say, “Look at me! I don’t care that I’m ugly and skinny. Oh, see how well I’m holding up! See!”

“Good morning, Sgt. Krummel,” she sang as only she could. “And how are we this fine morning?” She held the thermometer out like a stick of candy. As I tried to answer her, she stabbed me under the tongue, and crowed, “There we are!”

“Where?” I mumbled.

“Now who’s autograph is that?” she asked as she saw my sign. “Now, that’s not very nice, Sgt. Krummel,” she said, stiffening her back and propping her fist on what passed for her hip. “Just what is it?”

I spit the thermometer at her and answered, “A valentine?”