One to Count Cadence (6 page)

“Don’t let it trouble you,” he chuckled. “The girls in Town know more about what we do than we do.” He opened the steel door by inserting his badge in another slot, then led me into the electronic murmur of secrecy. Behind me I noticed that the old man had, with polite discretion, turned his back.

* * *

I took the ease of the afternoon after Tetrick’s tour, swimming and resting in the sun. The pool was mine except for a middle-aged dependent wife sitting on the edge of the pool, three loud children, the golden-fuzzy lifeguard, and two airmen. The woman alternately heaved one massive leg then the other through the water as tiny whirlpools in the chlorine-tinted water sucked vainly at her massive flesh. She sat under the lifeguard stand and chatted with golden-fuzzy. She seemed to be trying to peek up his trunks, and he down her blue suit, though why, I did not dare guess. The children were hitting each other, the meek waters of the kiddie-pool, me twice with rubber toys, and their mother for attention. At times all three balled at her passive shoulders, yammering and pounding their flesh of flesh. Mrs. Leech would shrug, laugh and shake her brown hair like a starlet, and fling the children away like so many dirty drops of water off an angry dog’s back, then turning up to golden-fuzzy again, grin up his skinny leg. The two airmen were quiet. One spent the whole afternoon rubbing iodine and Johnson’s baby oil into his already brown-black skin, while the other swam the length of the pool twenty times at an eight beat crawl, rested for five exact minutes, then swam again.

From the towel I communed in the broad open plain, bowing to Mount Arayat, the lifeless volcano squatting like an altar on the level distance, a ruined memory of ancient sacrificial fires, the tip of its cone crumbling into a snaggle-toothed decay as hordes of jungle clamored upward, hand over fist, pulling down the tired slopes. It was told that Huk bandits and headhunters shared the distant giant, secure in his hairy trunk, lost to man and his reckoning of time.

At five it rained for eleven minutes, sudden heavy drops, and at five-thirty the sun disappeared into a deep purple mass of clouds rising soft and curved against a shell-pink sky. I paused to watch the sunset, the purple reaching for black, the pink easing to purple, as I strolled back from the pool, toasted, hungry, tired.

After a silent meal I laid out a uniform, read for a bit, then dozed, awaking to the tickle of laughter, talk and the ringing of bottles. Never having been one to either stuff wax in my ears or tie myself to a mast, I slipped into my trousers and nosed down the hall toward the open door of Novotny’s room. As I passed, he called an invitation to me for a beer. I nodded, guessed that I would, and went on to the latrine.

As I entered, I nearly stumbled over someone crawling toward the urinals. He had that odor and slept-in look which I assumed to be Town. In spite of the dirt, the stubble and the glasses, he appeared to be a clean-featured young man of perhaps twenty or twenty-one, handsome in a tall, muscular manner, but his unkempt face hung like a bad smell over his dirty clothes. I offered to help however I could. He stared at me for a moment as if he knew who I was, then looked very bored with me.

“I’m Marduke the Mandrill and I play the mandolin with my mandible, baby, and I’m all right,” he said, holding up his right hand to show me the bloody, swollen knuckles. His voice, like his face, did not fit: his words were carefully enunciated, formed like bricks to be used in the construction of a Tower of Philosophy, absolutely undeniable. “Except for my left mandible, man,” he continued, examining the right hand under a pursed mouth, “I seem to be limping on it. I’m a cripple, you know, a fucking cripple, and there is no home in the American Army for a cripple crutch or a cripple creek or any other kind of deformity. Sorry about that, man. Suppose I’ll just be limping on home now,” he finished, crawling under the sinks toward the far end of the latrine, singing, “We shall overcome!”

He seemed happy and harmless (he had a great ability to seem), so I left him alone. As I left, I heard him shout, “Overcome! You’ve heard of overkill? Well, this is Overcome! Sperm whales of the world, unite! We shall overcome!” Then laughter mixed with the spasmodic gurgle of vomit. Then: “And the angel of the Lord thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of God’s wrath.” I shook my head and walked back to Novotny’s room.

If I had any questions as to the stability of the men of my trick after my encounter in the latrine, Novotny’s room answered them. They were, to the man, crazy. They called it “going Asiatic.” Six or seven drunks — they didn’t stand for counting — packed the room like an overcrowded cage of underfed monkeys. They chattered, they laughed and shouted in high, tired voices, they snatched squatty brown bottles of San Miguel beer from a waterproof bag filled with ice and drank them in quick selfish gulps as if afraid they might be stolen before finished. I accepted the offered beer and sat on the bunk next to Novotny.

“There’s a drunk crawling around the latrine,” I said.

“Don’t sweat it. That’s Mornin’ and he gets like that sometimes. He’s our demonstrator and Freedom Fucker.” He snipped off the ends of his words with the tight little grin of the night before.

“Well, he said he was all right. Except for his left mandible,” I said, holding up my right hand.

“I don’t give a shit who he calls it,” shouted a small fellow suddenly dancing in front of me. “Don’t care at all, just so he keeps decking them flyboys away. Deck ‘em away, away!” he said, slamming a fist into his other hand, ignoring the beer he held. Foam sparkled in his heavy black eyebrows and beer ran down his cheeks. “Saved me from that airman, he did. Swept him off my back like a fly. Boom! Swish!” Another fountain of beer. “Might have killed me, mac,” he said, holding his collar away from his tiny neck to expose six or eight blood-crusted scratches.

“Airman tried to give him a higher asshole with a rum bottle,” Novotny explained casually. “Then Mornin’ got the airman. That’s what they’re doing back so early. APs don’t understand that sort of shit.”

“Sgt. Krummel,” Novotny added, thumbing at me.

“Cagle, mac,” the small one said, holding out a hairy little hand.

“Caglemack?” I asked, shaking it.

“Just Cagle,” he said, wrapping his whole tiny face around a cigar. He continued dancing like a doll on a string, a leg this way, an arm that, and all the while his black little moustache wriggled and squirmed as if trying to crawl off his upper lip into his mouth. “Boom!” he shouted, whirling to the other side of the room. “Swish! Fly, flyboy, fly!”

I listened to the recounting of the three days, the new fuck at so-and-so’s, the arguments, Levenson’s tumble into the creek — he was pointed out as the naked, dreamy one in the corner, nonchalantly nude — the fight again, Franklin’s walk past a girl with the clap without catching another dose, and what a wonderful, awful Break it had been, hadn’t it? Their frenzy increased with each beer. They asked more than three days could have: life, love, and happiness.

After a couple of beers I went back to check on Morning. He was sitting on the lip of the shower stall, leaning against the frame, and beating his head on the tile, singing again, but the song was too soft to hear.

“Hey, you need a hand?” I asked. He was hitting his head quite hard against the tile.

He stopped, but still sang. He sighed, and looked up calmly. He seemed tired, looked haggard. Just that second it came to me that he was not as drunk as he wanted me to think, but drunker than he realized.

“I didn’t mean to kill my brother, you know,” he said in a quiet, normal voice, a very collegiate voice which might have advertised fraternity blazers on the radio. “I didn’t mean to.” He had been crying.

“Sure, buddy, I know,” I said, helping him to a sink. I ran cold water over his head for several minutes before he raised his face to the mirror. He stared at his reflection, then dried his glasses and said, “When I was a kid, I used to lay in bed after they made me turn the light off, used to lay there and make faces in the dark until I had one I thought was pretty good. Then I’d run to the bathroom and flip on the light to see it in the mirror.” He paused, replaced his glasses — Army glasses with colorless rims which should have seemed out of place on his face, but they gave him a bemused, scholarly dignity — and looked at me. “Now I come down at night to make sure I’m not making a face, just to be sure.” He shook the water off his hands, glanced once more into the mirror without expression, then walked slowly out.

Back in Novotny’s room, another beer in hand, I told him what Morning had said about killing his brother.

“Ain’t got no brothers. Just drunk again,” he answered.

“Morning’s my friend,” Cagle chimed, “but he’s a lousy fucking drunk sometimes.”

“How do you know?” Novotny asked, his grin sly.

“What the hell you mean, ‘How do you know?’ ” he answered, mimicking Novotny’s clipped words and grin. “I’ve known him since basic, that’s how I know.”

“Bullshit,” Novotny said calmly, challenging the world.

“What do you mean, ‘bullshit!?’ ” Cagle’s voice was high and shrill, and he stomped his foot. “Huh?”

“Never seen him drunk when you weren’t too, you little hairy fart, so how the hell do you know how drunk he gets. And speaking of lousy drunks, who was it beat up that jukebox? and who can’t go in the Tango anymore ‘cause they don’t pay for their beer? and just who the hell did the APs find under that Flip’s house at three in the morning?”

“You never seen a woman so ugly. I couldn’t believe that guy was really going to screw her, even if she was his wife. I had to see,” Cagle said, smiling at the memory. “Didn’t get written up, so fuck you, Navaho, and your pinto pony too.”

“Keep away from my woman, piss ant,” Novotny laughed and turned to me. “Ask the Beetle there,” he said, pointing at Cagle, “how many times he’s fallen on his fucking head and busted up an eyebrow. Everytime something hits the floor, everybody stands up and says, ‘Okay, where’s that fucking bug? Got to take him back and get his goddamned eyebrow stitched up again.’ “

“There’s a man knows a fine scar when he sees one,” Cagle said, pointing at the four inch half-moon on my cheek. He showed me the crosshatching of thin white scars hidden in his brows. “How about…”

“Oughta take up a collection to buy the Beetle a crash helmet for drinking,” Novotny interrupted.

As the hours passed I began to feel some responsibility as trick chief to get everyone to bed for a Little sleep before 0645. How should I play sergeant, I asked my beer bottle. An authoritative hint: “All right men, six o’clock comes pretty early!” A fawning plea: “Okay you guys, let’s break it up, huh? Get a little beauty sleep, you know, ha, ha.” Or a Listen-I’m-one-of-you-boys-and-I-hate-to-say-this-but-we-better-hit-the-sack sonnet. Perhaps just stand, flex my muscles, curl the ends of my moustache, and order, “Stop this shit.” By the time I finally decided to hell with them and that their sleep was their business, the gathering ended as neatly and naturally as I could have hoped. The three-day frenzy was over for them, and the six-day drag just beginning. Letters they had meant to write, sleep they had hoped to catch up on, and last-Break resolutions never to go to Town again were all lost chances. Fatigue muffled their “Goodnight, shitheads” and fogged their red-rimmed eyes and wrapped around them like tattered old blankets.

From my bunk, as I had a final cigarette and the night breeze stroked me, I heard Morning’s record player from across the hall. A high, thin female voice drifted easily around a guitar, sounding very small in the night.

The job of the 721st involved a sort of reverse spying for the Filipino military establishment on themselves. They provided us with schedules and frequencies of transmissions in certain areas, and we recorded the messages — Morse code groups by typewriter (mill) and voice on tape — and then the Filipinos checked for security violations by individual operators. These violations were nothing so dramatic as giving information to the enemy (nonexistent, anyway), but were usually on the order of one operator (op) saying so long to another op when he was being transferred or discharged, or the transmission of a message in the clear when it was supposed to be encoded. This was supposed to be a foolproof scheme to double-check on their communications security — but things proof against a fool are seldom of any help against a clever man.

Joe Morning was clever. If he thought he might be recording a violation, he would manage to lose the signal at just that moment. He claimed no desire to punish some hapless Pfc in another army making even less money than he. After the newness of the work wore off, I tended to agree with him, just so it didn’t happen too obviously; but at first I stayed on his back once I found out what he was doing. It was to his credit, I suppose, that he admitted what he was doing without being accused.

The afternoon of the first day I discovered his game with the static and security violations. I was checking copy-sheets, filing the necessary carbons and placing the originals in the attaché case the Filipino officer would pick up at 1530. I noticed that most of the copy was quite good for the day-trick, when interference was heaviest, except for Morning’s which was spotted with marks of ((((((GARBLED-GARBLED-GARBLED)))))) (((QSA NIL QSA NIL))) ((HERE NIL MORE HEARD — QSK 5 X 5)). I checked his next scheduled transmission on the extra console, and although the op had an unusual style of keying, he was so loud he might have been next door. Morning’s copy was again spotty. I thought perhaps he might not be a good Morse op, but later in the afternoon I watched him copy, with two fingers, a Chinese Communist (Chi Com) propaganda station sending 35 words per minute clear text Spanish. Morning copied without a mistake, almost without effort; he was a fine op. Only Novotny might be better. Morning stayed with the Chi Com a few minutes into his next schedule (sked). When he finished with it, I mentioned something about the quality of his copy earlier in the day, hoping he would understand that I knew what he was doing.