One to Count Cadence (43 page)

* * *

Abigail and I drifted through the two long sweet weeks, discovering love and our bodies during the cool evenings. I had rented a hotel room downtown, and we went there every night for two weeks. Gentle sweet mound of her belly, dimpled, hipbones hard, rib cage delicate as a bird’s, red-headed lover of a pussy, legs ever reaching apart… and only once did she mention marriage. I answered nothing, she said no more.

Morning would kid her when she came puttering around my bed (Gallard had moved Morning into the bed next to mine), her eyes puffy with nightwork, but her face shining like a fresh apple. He called her Catherine and me Fredrick Henry, and said he was sorry but she would have to die as soon as I deserted. The joke fell quickly, and in a few days Morning, in spite of the afternoon when he ate the golf ball, slipped once more into sullen silence. He went to town every night, and from what he said, was drinking again at The New Hollywood Star Bar with Communist students and unemployed gold miners. His eyes turned cold and secretive when he spoke to me at all, and there were no repeats of that friendly afternoon of the golf ball, no confidences, just superior smiles all day long.

Abigail asked me, one sleepy Sunday afternoon as we lay naked in my hotel room, “What’s the matter with Morning lately?” One slim white arm rested behind her head and the other dangled off the side of the bed holding a black Filipino cigarette.

“Nothing,” I said, kissing her pebbled armpit.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “I think he’s faking; I think he can walk.”

I rolled between her legs, bent to kiss her neck, then bent farther to run my tongue around the nipple of her small left breast. “So.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Be serious.”

“God knows I am, what-ever-your-name-is honey.” I nipped the corner of her mouth with my tongue.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “You’re never serious when I want you to be. Never.”

She held her mouth slack as I kissed her and she brought the cigarette and burned the back of my hand propped on the bed. She burned, but I didn’t jerk away.

“Shit,” she said, “don’t do me that way.” She twisted, grabbed my hand, and sucked the hole burnt into the skin. “Why do you do that?”

“Why do I do that?”

“Yes,” she said, a stray tear dropping on my hand. “You would have let me burn clear through your hand. You’re just crazier than shit, Jake.”

I laid my tongue into the stale salty ear.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “I’m trying to talk to you. Oh, Christ… Oh…”

“Can I do that?”

“Oh, Christ… yes,” she said, falling back on the pillow, then pulling my mouth to hers, whispering against my lips, “oh, Christ, yes, for about two days, ten months, and fifteen years.”

“How about something more reasonable, lady, say forty-five minutes.” I felt her giggle.

“Braggart.”

“Slut.” I felt her giggle again.

“You’re just never serious when I want you to be.”

“I try.”

* * *

Then one day Gallard took the cast off, issued me a cane, approved fifteen days convalescent leave, and invited Morning and me and Abigail for drinks that night. Abigail and I had planned to fly to Hong Kong on my leave, but hers fell through at the last minute. (Mother-fucking Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.)

Gallard had a place off base over behind the Country Club, a house perched on the edge of the bluff like a child’s dare, a lovely house with a screened porch running all the way around. A winding walk through a deliberately cluttered garden led from the road to the front door, and two tiny flower-like Filipino maids answered the Thai bells hanging beside the door. They held the door while Abigail and I maneuvered Morning’s chair up the steps to the porch, then down to a hall, along the hall past a collection of Negrito weapons, then down into a sunken stone living room, then up through an open dining room with a huge carved mahogany table and buffet, and then at last down to the back porch.

“Split-level houses and wheelchairs go together like shit and potatoes,” I said, as I rolled Morning up to the bamboo couch.

“Yes, that’s of course why I didn’t answer the door,” Gallard said from the couch.

“You gotta be kidding,” Morning said when he saw Gallard. He wore red silk lounging pajamas. “Fucking indecent.”

Gallard looked down. “These wrap-around flys were always the very devil to keep closed. I understand that’s their purpose.”

“I don’t mean you’re showing, man, you’re just glowing,” Morning said. “Pour me a drink, Fu Manchu; eyewash, if you got it.”

“Just gin,” he said, waving us to chairs.

We sat, drank as the sun disappeared from the ridges across the valley and and darkness fell like a swift blow, ate curry and purple rice and roast pig and sweet and sour ribs and fried rice while moths as large and white as our hands bobbed against the screen like itinerant ghosts seeking work and rice bugs pronged like suicidal maniacs off the wire. Drank again as the tiny lights in the valley expired, drank and talked, mostly about why we were here, Gallard’s lack of ambition, Abigail’s loneliness, Morning’s bad luck, my marriage, drank and talked as if we were never to see each other again, soldiers in a foreign land.

I had just finished my own sad story of love and mistakes and marriage, very drunk, when it started.

Abigail kissed me on the cheek and said, “But we’ll do it all right, Jake-baby.”

“Better stay way from that ugly bastard,” Morning muttered, then grinned. “He’s dangerous, lady, mad-dog mother.”

“That’s right,” Gallard sneered. “Professional killer.”

“Yep,” I grunted.

“Bullshit,” Abigail crooned, “he’s a lover.”

Gallard suddenly stood up, walked to the screen, then turned and nearly shouted, “Fuck. Stop that silly 1940s shit. Woman, this isn’t some goddamned movie shit, some romantic Hemingway novel. Oh, yeah, Miss Lonelyhearts, he’s your white knight, but he’s a fucking killer and I know it.” He leaned back against a beam. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“Right,” Morning hiccupped from his chair.

“He’s a lover,” Abigail said again.

“Okay, sure,” Gallard said, pouring more drinks. “Say you do persuade him to marry you. Say you do. He can’t stay in the Army. What’s he going to do for a living…”

“He’s going to be a college professor,” she interrupted.

“Are you?” Gallard roared, pointing his drink at me, gin dripping onto the mahogany coffee table in front of me. “Are you?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it, but I don’t think so.”

“So what’s left. An assassin? a mercenary?” He still shouted.

“Yeah,” Morning yelled. “An assimery?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “There’s still work in Africa. I don’t know. I guess I have to do something. Hired killer pays well sometimes.”

“See,” Gallard screamed, kicking his chair over, “see!”

“Jesus,” Abigail said, moving away from me.

“Well, just why the hell not.” Now I was screaming.

All three of them began shouting at me about the holiness of life, the worth of man, the sin of war, they shouted until my head roared and my hands sought to cover my face, shouted until it seemed a waking nightmare, screamed until I shouted stop and split the coffee table with one blow then shoved the pieces through the screen and tore my shirt off and faced them, crouched, fists clenched, choking back sobs till my muscles quivered.

“See,” Gallard said to Abigail, pointing at me.

“Goddamn you goddamn you,” I said, “oh, goddamn you. You bastards want to tell me about death, about war, about dying. Shit. Everything you say, I already knew, knew when I was born. Random risk the sound of that bullet tearing that kids balls off slapping six inches from my ear meant to blow off my head my head my blood and brains and life I know dirty guts looping everywhere every night sleeping night dreaming snakeshit guts chasing me up and down around my bed sweating blood across the compound mortars dropping scattering flesh like rotten tomatoes hot lead fried brains stinking on my face eyes floating round my night asking why blood stunned death pupils Franklin a piece of rotten stinking shit meat me wagonloads of arms and legs and livers and toes and fingers and heads and guts falling me killing Christ me…” I paused for breath, and sense. “You sent me to Gaul with the Legions then asked me why I became a Hun, you hired me for the Holy Land and called me heathen when I forgot to come back. Fight for my land, my home, you tell me, kill but forget it huh kid when it is all over. You used me you lied you used me you lied you used me, make the world safe for my kind, you say, but
your
kind can eat shit baby cause you are a killer, you say, and I am clean and white and care by God mother-fucker care about human life, you say, but you are not human go back in your cage bird they are not singing the war chant this year — from this day forth baby I fight no more for you but for me, me, me, me!” I walked out, sober now, before they could say another thing.

Abigail caught me because I had forgotten my cane.

“Jake, I’m sorry.”

I kept walking.

“Jake, I’m sorry, please talk to me.”

“If you don’t get your hand off my arm and if you don’t shut up I’m going to kill you right here right now.”

She stopped, but her sobs followed me down the dark road.

I was drunk when I got on the plane at Clark for Hong Kong the next day and I was drunk twelve days later when I got back and I still hurt.

What no one understood during Hong Kong time, all the drinking time, no one, not sweet tiny Chinese whores kissing bitter wounds, nor Aussie bartenders buying drinks to commemorate the horror of Malaya, no one understood that I loved the nightmare in spite of the fear, the disgust, the sickness; I loved the nightmares. One of me loved it, another was appalled. Still another looked on with cool distaste at the fight; and another drank and fucked to prove he did care; and even that isn’t the whole story. We drink today so we can get through tomorrow.

* * *

Because of an unseasonable fog I had to take the train from Angeles to San Fernando and a limousine from there, a bottle holding my hand all the way. I bought another one at the Main Club before I went to find Abigail. She wasn’t at home, nor in the ward, and Morning’s bed was empty. I limped to Gallard’s office, waited until he could, or would, see me, drinking.

“You want to hang one on me?” he asked as I walked in.

“Ah, forget that shit,” I said. “Where’s Abigail?”

“I don’t know. I want you to understand that I am sorry.”

“Sure,” I said, “Sure.”

“You don’t sound as if you understand it,” he said.

“Well just wait a while, man. I’ll get over it.”

“I am sorry. I’ll even tell you why. She wouldn’t have me, and here she was…”

“Just forget it, will you? Just forget it,” I interrupted. I stopped in the door as I left. “I guess I really mean that,” I said.

“I hope so,” he said.

“Me too.” I left.

* * *

The unseasonable fog had thickened while I had talked to Gallard. A Pacific front the dispatcher had said; weather in terms of war. Cold heavy fog curling round corners after me. Down the road, up past the Nineteenth Hole, and in the dimness I hear angry golfers curse the visibility, the weather, the unseasonable fog. “Kismit,” I shout at them, and my voice disappears in the vapors. Past the Main Club, standing under the damp limp flag, drinking to see through the mists below me. Just the other side of a three-foot stone wall, a bluff dropped away to the same valley Gallard’s house clung to the side of. Just three feet up, then seventy feet down to the first ledge, then bounce through the wet green trees, laugh, bounce, fall, laugh again, ringing across the misty valley.

It took four pulls on the bottle before I saw where they were. I ran up the hill by the Main Club, through the trees on a graveled path, then down into the depression among rows of flowers sleeping with wet drooping heads. At the bottom they both waited in the fog so still that they might have been statues waiting years for my return. He lay on the blanket, propped on one elbow; she leaned against the stone stage, arms folded before her.

“How nice,” I said, stopping before them to lay my bottle in his wheelchair.

“What did you expect?” she asked, her lips barely moving.

“This, I suppose. That’s why I came here. I believe in betrayal.”

“He believes in things, love, for instance, and you believe in nothing. It’s different,” she said, her face still etched in stone.

“You better believe it. Catch the pun. Tell the truth,” I said. “You’d rather scratch your own pussy, have a man for a handmaiden, a legal contract, a toy… You talk a good game, baby, but you can’t run with the ball. Well, you’ve got yourself another cripple. Be sure to convince him that he can’t walk; he might want to stand up someday. You couldn’t stand that. You gotta have the hurt ones, the drunks, the deserters, the murderers, the slaves, the…” Suddenly I was sitting on my butt. The punch had missed my jaw, but his forearm had pushed me down.

“You don’t talk to her like that,” Morning said standing over me. “Get up, you bastard, get up.”

I rubbed my eyes and face, trying to wipe the whiskey fuzz away. “What you doing, Morning? Shit, you’re walking man.” I smiled at him.

“You’re fucking-A right I’m walking.”

“Jesus, that’s great. How come you didn’t tell me?” I asked.

“You going to fight or not?”

I looked at Abigail; her eyes said please no; I said no.

“Well, get the hell out of here then.”

“Jake, he had a right to say those things,” Abigail said. “I deserted him at Dick’s that night. I should have waited until he got back. Now you stop it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Stop it and have a drink and tell me why you can walk.”

“Oh, piss on both of you,” Morning said, trying not to grin. “I’m sorry I hit you, Krummel, but you shouldn’t talk to her like that.”

“That’s okay,” I said; “you missed.” I stood up and got the bottle. “Have one on me.”

The three of us finished the bottle, then Morning climbed back in his wheelchair, and we took a cab downtown to The New Hollywood Star Bar to drink more. It was a small place, a bar and jukebox on the left, five small tables on the right. We sat at an empty table next to the jukebox. The other four tables were filled by young students wearing faces that glowed with revolutionary ardor and surly middle-aged unemployed gold miners with thick wrists and knotted forearms. Several of both had spoken warmly to Morning as I rolled him in, but more stared at me with hate dark on their faces.