One to Count Cadence (25 page)

“Do you mind if we join you, young lady. Perhaps buy you a drink or something?” Morning asked, his cool, confident self as always with the women.

“I am not so young as I was but, yes, please sit if you wish,” she answered, her voice as soft and heavy as her breasts. As we sat, she laid out a game of solitaire, placing each card as carefully and deliberately as if it were a piece in a puzzle. She moved with a patience, a sad dignity, but jolly wrinkles pinched the corners of her eyes and the suggestion of an ironic smile rippled about her face like a breeze on a pond.

“I’m Lt. Morning,” Joe said, “And this is…”

“Sgt. Krummel,” I interrupted before he made me a major again.

“Hello,” she answered politely, not pausing in her game. She gave no name. Morning asked her. “My name is what you wish it to be,” she replied. “That is my job, to be whatever and whoever men wish. Their girl friend, their wife, their mother, their battle, and I’ve even once been a sister. But it will cost you a lot of money, my young friend, to find out my name, because I’m a fine player. Yes, very much money.” She did not glance up from the cards.

“Do, do you work here?” Morning asked.

“No.” She answered as if that were the end of it, but after a short pause, added, “I work in Manila at the Golden Cave, but I also own this place. I come here to rest…” She paused again. “But for a profit, an unusual profit, or for even an unusual excitement, I might tell you my name. For say as much money as a lieutenant makes in, let us say, a week.” She raised her head to stare into Morning’s eyes, her long loose hair swaying back from her face. I saw mountain showers crossing the horizon at dusk, night rain swinging in the wind, and shimmering black strands coiled on a pillow. Her breasts bobbed shyly like a child’s first curtsy.

“Is it worth it?” he asked.

“Is it ever? Isn’t it always? I know a captain who says it’s better, something like — my accent is different from his — ‘Ya pays ya money, an’ ya takes ya chance.’ “

Morning laughed, then stood up to go for beer.

“Yes, I would very much like a beer, thank you,” she answered when he asked. “You don’t talk very much,” she said, looking up at me as Joe walked away.

“Keeps me out of trouble.”

“Your friend, he talks very much?”

“Very much. And lies a little, too.”

She laughed, soft and mocking like a muted trumpet. “All men lie to us. It doesn’t matter. I think I prefer the lies to the truth. Once a sailor told me the truth, that he loved men instead of women because he couldn’t help himself. After that, when he couldn’t make it, he cut his arms with a broken beer bottle. Yes, I better like lies, I think.”

“Did he die?”

“Who? Oh, the sailor. No, he was lying about that. But he did ruin four of my dresses and nearly lost my job.”

“The Golden Cave is a very famous place. I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never been there.”

“You must come sometime. During the week. Never on weekend. But this is a famous place, too. It isn’t as… what would you say?”

“Elegant?”

“Elegant, yes. But it is haunted.” She stopped her game, took the beer Morning brought and continued, “It has been here — the house, I mean — since before the war. It was the only building left standing when the Japs shelled the city. An officer, a colonel I think, used it as his civil headquarters or something like that, and he ran the city. He was big for a Jap, even as big as you, and very mean. He killed many of my people in here. He shot them against that wall, in the stomach, and watched and laughed and drank as they bled to death. Some people say you can still hear the laughter and screams on certain dark nights. They say his evil is still in the walls.” She drank from the bottle. “For three, four years the blood soaked the floor. Then once a young girl, a virgin he stole from the church altar, was brought here, and when he tried to screw her, she vomited on him. They said he beat and beat her, then cut a breast off and ate it before her as she bled to death. But he was upstairs drunk when the Americans came and was left behind.

“My people came and took him and many wanted to torture him, and they tore one finger off and made him chew it a little bit before the leader stopped them. Then they chopped his head off with an axe. They said his mouth was still laughing when it hit the floor.” She rose and motioned us to the bar, showed us the three deep gashes in the wood and then made us put our fingers in the bullet scars in the wall.

“An evil devil,” she said as we sat down, “and evil never dies. You know that. My people tried to burn this place, but a storm came and put the fire out.

“Then one night about three months later a wind blew out all the candles upstairs and down. Before they could be lit again, a girl ran downstairs screaming, half-naked, with one breast cut off. She died of fright, and though they searched and searched the house for the breast, it was not found. Never.

“And so the lights are never turned off,” she said, waving her delicate hand. “Never. And when a monsoon wind breaks the electricity, something bad happens. Always very bad.” She smiled as she finished the story as if it had rubbed her tired back. “So this is called The Haunted Whorehouse.”

“A fine tale,” I said. “Beautiful.”

“Oh, but it is not a tale. Go ask any of the girls.”

I walked over to the giggling mingle of whores and asked the one with Novotny. The girl on Novotny’s lap flung her head up at me, quickly covered her breasts with her arms and in a child’s voice said, “Oh, but you must not talk of it for bad luck.”

The world continued around me, the talk, the music, the dancing, Cagle squealing on the fat whore’s lap, but inside the needle-iced shell of my body, time stumbled long enough for the girl’s fear to be mine. The ghost was real.

“I think I need a beer,” I said when back at our table.

“I told you,” she said.

“Joe, that kid was scared out of her mind. It was as bad as seeing the ghost myself.” I had always kept a silent fear of seeing a ghost. Not that I expected the spirits to harm me, but that fatal knowledge of seeing one would be fright enough. I looked too hard not to see one someday.

“And now you’re scared shitless, too,” Morning sneered. “Man, you kill me, Krummel. A mystic reactionary frustrated hero. Man, you have to stop it with this ghost bit,” he said.

“But that’s what makes history, ghosts,” I said.

“Come off it. Forget about dead bastards and worry about live ones. You can’t help the dead ones, but you can sure as kill the living trying to satisfy all those ghosts of yours. Look at Germany. Man, there must be at least thirty thousand ghosts per square mile left over from just the Thirty Years’ War alone…”

And as easily as that he and I began arguing again, fretting all ranges of human knowledge; both, I’m sure, doing our best to impress the nameless lady in black. But she didn’t play that way. Morning was expressing the usual liberal line that better environments make better people.

“People make shit,” she said, “not the other way around.” She stepped right in, disparaging our philosophies, matching our educations with her life. Morning and I might have eight years of college between us and all sorts of misquoted quotes to use, but she had started life as a twelve-year-old whore and had not only gone up instead of down, but still could laugh about it. She was a tight, mercenary little thing: there were no, so to speak, “for love” pieces in her collection of girls, and the only gold she covered with her toughness was deposited in the bank in Manila. But she wasn’t too hard to laugh, to be capricious when the mood suited her, or even to be foolish if she wished. She had paid for this liberty, and as long as she could keep up the payments on her luxuries, she intended to enjoy the freedom. If Morning and I had lusted for her body at first, we ended loving her husky, mocking laughter. A new warmth rosed Morning’s face and I knew he, too, was enjoying the wonderful ache of having a woman to talk to. A piece of ass, even a good piece, was reasonably cheap in the Philippines but, ah, a man couldn’t buy conversation with an intelligent woman for love or money. (But why did she talk to us? Later she was to say because we acted as if we knew everything and she wanted to teach us better, and also because she had never seen two such good friends who hated each other so much.) She talked even more than Morning and I, which was going some. She shouted and slapped the table and gulped lustily at her beer, dismissed a long involved argument with a wave of her hand, and laughed with us and at us. Once she touched Morning’s cheek and the bastard blushed. Then he laughed at me when she tugged at one end of my moustache and said, “You’re not so mean. I could take you.” She made me remember the good things and I suppose it was my happiest night in a long while, wonderfully happy without violence — until David came.

He called himself David and he wanted more than anything to have Teresita (she had slipped us her name for free during the laughter earlier). He had slept with her, but always for money, and never as often as he wished. David was twenty-four or five, tall for a Filipino, over six feet, slim and well built. Managing to forsake the slick-haired thin-moustached look of a petty Latin gangster, he kept his hair in a bushy crew cut, and except for the
barong tagolog
he wore, he might have been an airman from L.A. or San Antonio.

“Hey, man, you cats cooling my chick for me?” he quipped as he swung up to the table. Teresita introduced us, explaining that David owned, or rather ran when his father was out of town, the only other respectable whorehouse in Dagupan.

“Sure, man,” he laughed. “Just lay around and watch the bread make.”

“You giving any free samples tonight?” Morning asked. “Or maybe it’s Happy Hour and I can get two for one, huh?”

“Man, you’re putting me on. Like you have to keep ahead in this racket. Right, T-baby? And a little free tail can sure put a man behind, and though I’ll admit to like a little behind now and then, most the time I take my stuff straight.” David told us about all the Americans he knew and loved, and how he had worked as a yardboy at Subic Bay Navy Base a while after high school to get his English perfect, and how he was not like those ungrateful Filipino cats because he really loved Americans, and how that was the trouble with the PI, not being enough like the U.S. of A. where he was going someday. Morning stopped him right there to explain what a shithole America was, and how David would be treated like a Negro in many places, and how awful it was to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Teresita fell out of the conversation and began another game of solitaire while I watched.

Morning and David dug all the manure in American life, then collaborated on a mythical black-market deal which would make them both rich (and ruin the Philippine economy), and then chatted about burning some grass if David could score. Teresita lost three games, and I drank two nearly uninterrupted beers. I understood by David’s quick dismissal of me and his patronizing references to my size that he thought me stupid and slow. I answered his questions in confused mumbles to help him think so even more. I didn’t like him; he was too cool, too friendly, too much. David thought that Morning was his competition. Not that he wasn’t, for at that point in the evening Teresita might have gone to bed with any one of the three of us purely out of bored exasperation, like an old bitch hounded into a corner by a pack of yapping, horny, squirting puppies will sometimes squat just a bit for one just to get shut of the pack.

When the conversation died for lack of an easy connection, David suggested that we, good-natured, intelligent group of friends that we were, should run the pasteboards together. He wanted to play poker, but Teresita absolutely refused. The only game we all knew was Go Fishing, but no one could remember how to play it, so we settled on Hearts even though we had to teach Morning of all people as the game went along. Teresita had learned the game from another girl at the Cave; David had been taught, yes, by a Navy lieutenant’s wife at Subic; and I had learned the game at my father’s hairy knee.

Not to brag, mainly because it isn’t worth boasting about, but I was and am a tough Hearts player, and I pinned David’s ears to his short-haired head. Oh, I played sloppily, acted the fool, spilling my hand about, and being so amazed each time I dropped the queen of spades and thirteen bad points on David’s trick. “Har har har there Davey-boy. Guess ya caught the old bitch again, har har.” He caught on quick, but it didn’t help, and he lost his cool, stopped his incessant man-man-man routine, and started sweating. Twice he whispered to Teresita in Tagalog, but she answered with a shrug as if to say, “Maybe so. Maybe not.” The single time he managed to drop the queen on me, I said, “Well, ya got my butt that time, Davey-boy,” and then ran the rest of the tricks and put twenty-six bad ones on him. “Sons of bitches” he shouted, slapping the table; then whipping on his too-swift smile, said, “Oh, not you. These damned cards.” Teresita was completely indifferent to the whole game, and played as if it were just a game, though she knew that in some dead-end alley of the masculine mystique we were playing for her. Morning lost his love for David and sat on him a few times too. Teresita soon tired of both games, but not too quickly for David to think that he had been humiliated.

She walked away to see to the bar or some other unnecessary thing, displaying her wares for the bidders one more time. The price rose right away. David said, “You’re a big guy. Want to arm wrestle? I’m just a little guy, but I’ll take you on.” I put him off longer than I really wanted to, but he kept pushing and Morning kept prodding, so I finally said okay.

David was wiry and not lacking in flesh and muscle, and had probably beaten all the kids in town the same day he saw his first arm-wrestling match in a movie; but he was giving away forty or fifty pounds to me. I was fair enough at the game to be able to quietly, humbly boast that I had only been beaten once, and then by a professional football player, as long as I didn’t add that he was a halfback in the Canadian League. I had been held or nearly beaten several times by medium-sized wiry guys, and I understood how David beat Goliath: not only God, but the whole damned Christian world is always on the side of the little guy. It’s like never getting to play on your home field. So I worried. Everytime I happened into one of these things I would reassure myself that the world wouldn’t end, nor my life become meaningless, nor my pecker fall off, if I were beaten. I always told myself such and, of course, never believed it, but I should have realized that night in Dugupan that my instincts had been correct all along.