One to Count Cadence (40 page)

I went for Novotny and his detail, but found them huddled against the wall, four dead, six wounded, and Novotny hung over the wall, a gutter wound laced black up the side of his head. The sergeant who had stepped on my hand said, “Dead. Direct hit.” His left ear was gone and that side of his head covered with blood, but he seemed intact. I herded the mobile members of Novotny’s detail into the trench thinking of nothing but staying alive. I didn’t even care.

I set up to the right of the CP, the Armalite and the shotgun ready. The VC had fair cover now, Chinese grenades — more bark than bite — coming from behind the nearer generators, some men firing from behind the sandbags on top of the further vans. But we had grenades going out too, the 81mm mortars were beginning to walk in from the outer perimeter west gate. They had to come now.

Twenty or so men spilled out into the open from either side, some crawling, some charging, some kneeling for covering fire. Black pajamas and Jesus-boots flapping, the little men came like hounds of hell, like a forest fire, a crown fire leaping from tree to tree in a mad race of destruction. Those of us who were going to fight were up now, saying at least that we weren’t going to die in our holes. At least ten VC fell in the first burst from the trench, but others kept coming.

As they swept past the third van on the right, half a dozen grenades went off among them. They faltered and in that hesitation another ten fell, though not all hit, for they kept firing from their bellies, or tried to crawl to the shelter of the vans. Those left charging were cut down quickly.

I hit a bunch of three on the left at about fifteen yards with the shotgun; they washed into five more, and the mass was ripped apart. Then another one on the right at five yards as he killed the man next to me, then another out of the air as he leapt over the trench. That was the last of the charge. I traded the shotgun for the Armalite, then went down the right after those who had fled to the spare safety of the vans. One in the foot as he knelt, another in a shower of sparks as he poked head and rifle around a van, and a third in the back as he climbed into a van.

Then Joe Morning stepped out of the door of the third van, shot a kneeling man in the back of the head. Then he ran into the midst of them, firing from the hip like a hero, but he hit at least three more before he folded at the waist like a waiter giving a surly bow, folded, fell, lay still.

After Joe Morning, we mopped up. The VC were beat, but not a single one surrendered. It was over. Oh, the planes chased the VC through the jungle, and the troops stayed on full alert, but it was over.

We collected our wounded, leaving the dead to sleep until daylight. Casualties were high; the 721st ceased to be operational. So many dead, so many ways to die. The mortars had done the worst damage. Dottlinger was the only one I saw without a shrapnel wound of some sort. (I don’t mean to imply that he stayed in the CP; he was up firing during the charge, after the charge, after it was over.) Haddad had a black hole in the very center of his bald head, but not another mark on him, the round disappearing as surely as if it had been fired into the sky, and it is buried with him. A nickel-sized piece of shrapnel had torn through Quinn’s cheek — in one side and out the other with about fifteen teeth, but not his bad one — and when he was hit, he fell on a tent peg and lost an eye. Peterson had his heel shot or blown off, but other than that he was all right. Cagle, Novotny, Morning, Haddad, Franklin, dead. (Though you know, as I do, that I was mistaken. Cagle wasn’t dead, but was on the back side of the aid station, and I didn’t see him. He lost two ribs and his right arm, but they saved his lung after it had collapsed. Novotny wasn’t dead either, but deaf now.) All the new members of the Trick were still in the vans, dead in the vans where they had stayed. It was over.

I was supposed to be checking the dead VC, but I wandered past Morning’s body being dragged away (I knew he was dead), and into the van he had come out of. Eight jumbled positions, four bodies present and accounted for, three new guys whose names I didn’t want to know, but the fourth was a VC, a small terribly old man sitting in the corner. He looked like the one with the dynamite grenades that I had missed, but I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly I had to pee so badly that tears welled in my eyes. Holding my crotch, I ran out the side door, slipping in blood or coffee at the door, but not falling, then rushed to the still smoldering latrine. All the canvas had burned away and the wooden seat still smoked. I couldn’t imagine why I had come to the open latrine to pee, and then I couldn’t stop giggling. A paperback collection of Huxley essays and a flashlight also smoked on the seat. I peed on them. Goddamned Joe Morning caught in the can reading by flashlight while the VC shot the hell out of the place. Shit. But he’d fallen too… I finished, then wandered back to the van, feeling his loss, feeling the guilt creep in on tiny but sharp-clawed feet.

Lost, tired, afraid, I can’t go on. I sit next to the old, the skinny old man, reach for a cigarette in a shirt I no longer wore, or, no, I had quit, hadn’t I; I don’t know. One of the dead new guys had some in his shirt. How can a new guy be dead? No, no. How can a dead guy be new? I take his package. He’s quit smoking for his health. The old man doesn’t want one for his health either. Smoking fouls his sense of smell, and he can smell an American five hundred yards away; Americans don’t smell like the earth but stink to high heaven. I shove a butt in his mouth anyway. Universal peace offering between men of war, but it won’t stay lit. any more.

“There you go, pops,” I say. His short flat nose was all mangled and bloody, his eyes were silent as his voice. “No place to get shot, pops, right in the snoot. And in the chest too. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and one in the snoot for eight. Somebody had a grudge on you, old man. Say, what’s an old fart like you doing mixed up in this shit, anyway? …

“Not telling, huh? Maybe you don’t know either. By God, old Joe Morning knows. Knew. Generals, politicians, captains of industry want us here, he says. But you could have stayed in your rice paddy, and I could have stayed home. But you weren’t meant to be a rice farmer, nor I a college man. We’re here ‘cause we’re afraid, old man. Joe Morning didn’t know shit. That’s why he’s dead. I don’t know why you’re dead, but that’s why he is. He thought he knew. You ever meet him? Too bad, ‘cause he’s lying out there now, deader than shit, deader than shit…”

But now I slept, my left arm cradling the old man, and I let my dreams tell him all I knew about Joe Morning, all I knew.

* * *

I woke in faint light, blinking in the shadows as a shaft of bright air fell across the open door. There were voices outside, Tetrick, Saunders, Dottlinger, making a KIA and damage report, and a loud throbbing of choppers as they lifted out the last of the wounded. The three came in the door, and I started to get up, but Dottlinger shot me before I could stand. The old man’s body had fallen across me and took two .30 carbine slugs for me, but one knocked my right arm back against the wall, and another slammed my right leg hard against the metal floor. Dottlinger saw, almost as he did it, who I was, and he dropped the carbine.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “You got the machine gun, Krummel; you’ll get the distinguished… you know… cross… something… commissioned in the field… I didn’t…”

Tetrick and Saunders stood on either side of him, fatigue tugging at their faces. Tetrick cried. Saunders turned and knocked Dottlinger back out the door with the clipboard in his hand.

Stunned, sleepy-drunk, but in no pain yet, I pushed the old man off me, and thought I would stand and salute. It seemed the perfect gesture, which is to say, what Joe Morning would have done, but as I shouted Attention! through the tears clogging my throat and tried to stand, the bone grated in my leg, and not the pain but the sound knocked me out with disgust…

… and I woke here in this bed, determined to tell someone the truth. All this leading up to the truth. But it has taken too long. I find myself trapped by my own confession. The scene, the moment of extreme truth, swept past without me, the keys of my old machine clacking like knitting needles, and I without blade to cut the thread.

Turn back, turn back, dear reader: “Then he ran into the midst of them, firing from the hip like a hero, but he hit at least three more before I swung my sights across his middle and blew out the base of his spine with three quick rounds, and he folded like a waiter giving a surly bow, folded, fell, lay still.”

There it is. I killed Joe Morning. I shot Cock Robin. Rah, rah, rah.

But you already suspected that, didn’t you? That’s all right. The whole purpose of any confession is to make the confessor, the guilty party, feel better. One whispers his crimes into the ear of a priest, or shouts them at his friends, or lends them to paper. Murderers tend to think they are poets; how distressing to discover that they were poets all along. It wasn’t guilt that made me hesitate to confess my murder of Joe Morning, but my vanity. I knew it would affect you if it seemed that I couldn’t bring myself to confess. Nonsense. I cared more when I killed him on paper than I did when I killed him for real. I also thought about letting him live. I wanted to kill him for a reason, rather than on a whim. No such luck, you say, He’s dead. Nonsense. He’s not dead at all.

I’ve known for three days that the voice screaming down the hall belonged to my friendly enemy, Joseph Morning, but the momentum of the confession, once confided to paper, carried me on, leaving me in the rather absurd position of confessing to a murder that didn’t take place, yet. Art deceives as well as History; Life imitates Art as often as Art does Life; History seems to have little connection to either one. I can’t apologize for lying, for only an accident of timing kept my confession from being as true as I knew. Should I confess just intent, or should I admit only life-like confusion? Art, History, Life: traitorous knaves. Don’t blame me; I’m just their foolish pawn chained to my machine.

That infinite number of monkeys somewhere out there pounding at their machines for an infinite time surely will re-create Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and me, but God knows if they’ll ever finish writing the truth.

Please don’t despair because it’s not over at all.

I must admit that I was glad to see the bastard again. He lay, pale after the long still months in a Saigon hospital, immobilized like a huge turtle by a large cast from toes to chest, thinner, and somehow older, in his hospital bed.

“Off your ass, soldier,” I said as I rolled into his room.

“Krummel?” he asked, his head unable to turn to see me.

“Joe, Joe, how are you?”

“Bad, man,” he said. “Really bad. Crippled. Can’t walk, can’t get a hard-on, can’t do anything.” Tears seeped out of the corner of his eye, the one I could see.

“They’ll fix you. Uncle Sam owes you that,” I said, trying to joke. I’d rather see him dead than crippled, I thought.

“No, man. All the king’s whores and all the king’s men can’t put old Joe Morning back together again.” He forced a chuckle.

“Cut it out,” I said. “This guy Gallard is a magician, man. Hell, he tied my leg back on, didn’t he? He’s all right. He’ll fix it up for you.”

“There’s just nothing left to fix, Krummel. Nothing.”

Nothing to say either, so I shut up for a while. Morning talked, but said nothing, and I wouldn’t have heard it if he had.

“Well, guess I’ll take off, kid. Got a heavy date,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

“Krummel,” he said. “I need you to help me. You’ll help me, won’t you? Won’t you?”

“Sure. You know I will.”

“Get me… some sleeping pills or something like that,” he mumbled.

“Why?”

“Why do you think? I can’t stand this… crippled… bad scene, man… not for me… please…” he choked.

“Ah, Christ,” I said. “To hell with you, Morning, just to hell with you. You’re the most melodramatic mother in the world.” I rolled away from the bed. “Please help me, Krummel, please,” I mocked. “I’m tempted, by God, I’m tempted, if only because you’re such a pain in the ass. You want to die, just rot then. To hell with you.” I turned the chair, knocked a pitcher off the nightstand, then moved out the door. “To hell with you.”

I met Abigail in the hall outside.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “I thought we had a date.” In a brown, red, and gold tweed skirt and soft brown sweater with the sleeves pushed back around her elbows and loafers, she was as lovely as a fall coed in autumn. “What’s the matter?”

“Wasting my time,” I said. “I knocked a pitcher off the table in Pfc Morning’s room. Would you pick it up for me?”

“What were you doing in there? You know him?”

“Old friends,” I said.

She walked into Morning’s room, stayed longer than necessary, and when she came back, her sweet face was wrinkled in concern. Tiny white teeth chewed at her pale lips, and her hands held each other as if no one else had ever reached out for her.

“He’s crying,” she said, walking behind my chair but not pushing it yet. “He wouldn’t answer me. He’s just crying. What did you do?”

“I shot him,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.

“Why is he crying?”

“To hell with him,” I said. “He enjoys crying. He’s crazy about it. Leave him alone. He’s bad medicine. Stay away from him.” Once again she didn’t listen, but she did push the chair down the hall. “You’re lovely today, maiden.”

“Huh?”

I grabbed the spokes and turned the chair out of her hands. “Listen to me,” I said. “Is all of you going outside, or are you going to leave half of you in here?”

She took the hand I gestured with, held it with both of hers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But he looked so damned sad. Like a little boy whose dog was just run over. I felt so sorry for him.”

“Yeah,” I grunted.

“Yeah what?”

“Yeah nothing.” I turned, pushed myself on toward the door.

“All right, Billy Goat Gruff,” she whispered when she caught me. “Don’t bite the milk of human kindness.” She pushed me on out the door.

We rolled downhill through the golf course, uphill around the Nineteenth Hole Clubhouse, along the bluff past the Main Club. I took off the blue convalescent pajama top, lay my head back, and let the sun work on me. I kept my eyes closed until we were past the Main Club and into a stand of timber going uphill again on a graveled footpath.