One to Count Cadence

7. Dagupan

Trick Two packed itself into the Air Force bus with the rented Filipino driver before seven-thirty the next morning. As I came out of the barracks, they greeted me with hoots and jeers for being so foolish as to want breakfast, then booed when I sent half of them back to the Orderly Room to sign out. When they came back, I climbed aboard behind them, swung down the aisle over the stacked K-rations, the garbage can of iced beer, the four cases of beer and six cases of Chianti and Rhine wine, and finally dropped into the rear seat between Morning and Novotny.

"What are you? an ape?" Cagle sneered, puffing on a huge cigar.

"Naw. What are you? a forest fart?"

"Ah, all you fucking Jews are the same," he answered, blowing smoke my way. "Have a gas attack, you…"

"Oh, no we're not," Levenson simpered at him, waving a limp wrist over the seat as the bus pulled out of the drive.

"Vhy, there hasn't been a single Jew in de same house mit a Slagsted-Krummel in twenty-five venerations."

"Nazi," Morning said. "Gary Cooper's queer."

"Genet isn't."

Et cetera.

It was a good morning. The air still held a trace of dew and a cool wind eased the fatigue left over from the night before. All faces bloomed, brown, bright, and happy, all voices bubbled. Even Franklin's acne was better. No one mentioned the raid, until Pete came out of his perpetual daze long enough to remark in a surprised voice, "Geez, somebody might have got killed last night. If we hadn't been on the roof. Geez."

No one spoke for several minutes, and then the bus was at the Main Gate. Filipino carpenters were already cleaning up the two piles of lumber which had been the sentry box and guard shack. Several gaping black circles marked where vehicles had burned. The Air Policemen who came aboard to check passes and search for black-market goods were quiet and methodical about their work, without any of the usual GI-airman banter, nor did they check as closely. Their faces showed the loss of friends, and ours the guilt of going out to play.

Every man on the Trick had a legal quart of Dewar's Scotch and one legal carton of Chesterfields in his AWOL bag. Twenty new classical records were stacked on a new portable record player. Everyone understood that these things were going to the market, but nothing could be done. The APs had to let the goods out the gate, since it only became criminal when you sold them, and no one, except fools and children, ever got caught in the act of selling. The big operators like Haddad paid certain Air Policemen a high tariff, so they weren't usually caught either. As the APs left the bus, one knocked over a K-ration carton. Morning jumped slightly, but let the AP pick it up. The gate routine was always unpleasant, and everyone was glad to get down the highway toward Tarlac.

Just past the nearby barrio of Dau, the driver turned on a dirt track which led behind a clump of banana trees.

"Where's he going?" I asked.

"Meet the man," Novotny answered.

"What man?"

"Breadman."

The bus halted beside a jeepny with two men in it. Packs of cigarettes suddenly appeared from socks and shirts. The top four K-rations were opened to reveal tobacco instead of food. Cartons were collected from under seats and hood and behind a false fire wall. It was a black-market Merry Christmas, and everyone streamed off the bus to barter with the breadman except Haddad and me. After the sale Morning collected expenses for the bus, driver and beer, then waving the pesos, shouted "Hallelujah" and passed out the beer.

North of Tarlac the bus swung left toward the Lingayan Gulf, sweeping past small barefoot boys attending lethargic water buffalo sprawled in the ditches like forgotten mounds of tar. The sun had burned all memory of the morning from the air, and we raced toward a glassy, shimmering haze as it in turn ran from us. The metal edge of the windows burned your arm when you propped it up to catch the hot breeze, and sweat ran in crazy rivers down your ribs. In a second the fatigue and beer would make you forget the hot window and your arm would slip back up, then be cursed and jerked back again. The beer was cold and biting in your throat, but not cold enough. Novotny's drunken voice buzzed in the heat; near, then far away in the drowsy haze.

"That was all right last night. After you got over being scared, it was all right." He sat easily in the bumping seat, his body loose and fluid with the swaying, jolting bus, while a perfect gyroscope balanced him. The beer in his bottle stirred, but the rest of us were busy wiping beer out of our faces. "Maybe we all need a couple of good wars for Christmas."

"Yeah, but what if somebody had gotten their ass shot off," Morning growled from across the aisle. "Wouldn't be quite so much fun then, would it?"

"Oh hell, there aren't any more good wars," I said. "Not since the cannon was invented and airplanes started firing on ground troops. No more. Now there's the bomb. How can a man enjoy a good war, if he knows there's a chance that some silly bastard who believes in things will push the funny button and wipe up the whole works. There's no sense in it any more."

"Fuck. There never was any sense in it. War is stupid. The most terrible thing man can do to himself," Morning said, leaning up.

"I don't know about that. A little war every now and again seems to put a bit of backbone in a people. They can't function as a people except during a war, and even if it's only a little bit more than usual, it is more."

"Man," Franklin laughed, "that's all you lifers do – wait for a war." A general chuckle followed.

"So what's a soldier for? To paint shitcans and file reports? All of you know how you hate being that kind of menial…"

"Maybe we'd hate being murderers too," Morning interrupted. "Anything is better than being a hired killer, anything, and that's all a soldier is. It seems to me," he continued, pinching air between his forefinger and thumb and shaking it at me, "that soldiers are nothing but dumb shits who don't know how to enjoy life so all they can dream of is a glorious Viking death. Whatever they've done or not done in their whole damned lives is okay if they die fighting. My God, Krummel, you've seen them; unhappy turds, either drunks or religious fanatics, waiting for a war. And if they had the chance and the power, they'd have one too. And someday when America goes Fascist, they'll have their war, and burn 70 million American Negroes when they start losing. Soldiers, ha, frustrated boy scouts and latent homosexuals."

"If they are, Morning, it's only because guys like you have made them that way with your believing in things, in thinking that men should fight not for power or money or lust but for ideas or gods which are the same thing. War is the human condition. It's natural for a man to want more than is his, and when he wants it badly enough, he'll kill to get it. That seems to me to be more sensible than fighting for ideas. People once recognized the warrior as the leader of his race, but now you think he must be a fool or a brute, and since it is you guys with your mouths open all the time, you even convince him that he is…"

"What other animal kills his own kind, but a foolish and brutal one?" Morning interrupted. Franklin started to make a joke, but stopped when he saw the anger in Morning's face.

"Any one that finds his kind, even his brother, in his way, encroaching on his territory or trying to steal his food or mate. Except that animals don't believe in right or wrong or unconditional surrender. Man's supposedly – and people like you have done all you can to convince him of it – only a higher animal, so maybe his sensitivity to encroachment is more highly developed and he kills for other kinds of assumed offenses. I don't know… there are a lot of things I don't know that maybe I'd learn in a war. How many novelists find war to be the most perfectly defined moment in their lives? How…"

"How many find it the last moment of their lives?"

"People die in car wrecks."

"I'm against them too."

"Christ, Morning, man has always been obsessed with murder. Maybe it answers questions. Maybe the killing gives you something holy. Maybe you find out about God then."

"It seems to me," he said, shaking that pedantic finger and thumb again, "that you're obsessed with murder. You got killing mixed up with screwing in that Puritan middle-class mind of yours." He laughed harshly. "Man, it is wrong for one man to kill another man. Don't you understand that."

"Of course I don't understand that. Everyone tells me its wrong, but they don't tell me why."

"Shit, it's self-evident."

"Bullshit, it's self-evident. All my life I've read about the glories of killing. What about the millions of comic books and B-movies I ate up? Like every kid. Like every one of us. I learned that killing the enemy was a good and beautiful thing…"

"But those were…"

"You goddamned right they were lies. So three goddamned cheers. All men lie out of their ignorance, so how am I to choose between lies?"

"Like I was saying," I eased out, "I learned that killing the bad guys was all right, even noble when it was done with honor and dignity. And then you people taught me that there are no bad guys, no black or white hats, just misguided gray ones. But you did it the wrong way – you made fun of the good guys instead of trying to make me understand the bad ones. You made fun of them, and since the Western idea of morality is totally without a sense of humor, you made me care more for the bad guys. You peddled the crap that a gangster was better than a snappy, wheeler-dealer preacher because the gangster was more honest. Okay, so tell me it's wrong to kill another man?"

"Okay, mother-duck, I'll tell you: It's wrong for one man to kill another, and war is an evil fucking horrible thing!" He ended with a shout.

"Would you have killed Germans in the war?"

"Sure…"

"Because they believed evil things?" I asked.

"Sure… but I would have realized it was…"

"But now it's America which believes the evil things?"

"That's right."

"But we believed in evil in the forties just as much as now, perhaps even more, but you would have killed the Germans rather than the Americans, then…"

"All right," he shouted, "but I would have realized that it was wrong and done it like a painful duty, an awful but necessary job."

"Jesus Christ, Morning, now it's you who doesn't care about man. You can't kill men like it was a job. What an insult to the whole human race that would be. It has got to have romance, it has to be the completion of a love affair, and an act of love, not a duty." I opened my arms and lowered my voice. "It isn't just 'Wine, Women and Song' men lust after, it's war too, by God! And until you damned moral Christian Romans came along, men had sense enough to have gods which enjoyed wine, war, women, and song along with us frail mortals. But now we're civilized, Roman and Christian – even you atheists are Christian – a nation of shopkeepers, carpenters and librarians; slaves in the name of individual freedom. Shit! Death defines life…"

"Can't you get it through your thick damned skull that war isn't like you think it is going to be. It isn't beautiful; it's ugly, awful and ugly, and painful and cold and hungry. Man is for life not death!"

"How do you know?"

"I know."

"Okay, and I know it is the best thing in this miserable damned civilized world. It is a clean and simple thing, a fire that brands a man, and if it hurts it should, damnit, and men love it deep in their sinful hearts! Love it! And so do you, Joe Morning. You whine now, but you loved shooting at those poor little bastards last night."

He stopped, took a hasty drink of beer. I'd stepped on his toes too hard, too hard. "You mean you love it," he said, shaking that clutched finger and thumb again. "Mean, sick bastards like you."

"I don't know yet… but I'm going to find out. I've got to find out."

"Oh, you poor crazy son of a bitch," he said, then paused, sighed, and continued, "you really are crazy."

"Don't be silly," I said, ready to smile and forget.

"You bastards talk too much," Novotny drawled.

"Don't patronize me, you son of a bitch!" He stood up and flung his arms away from his body as if casting off a heavy cloak,

"Come on, forget it."

"Fuck you!"

"That's a pretty intolerant attitude for the great white Left," I said.

"Boy, you play the big educated soldier, ancient tradition of intelligent warriors ready to defend man against his enemies, man, but when it comes right down to it, you're nothing but a half-assed impotent brute looking for your balls on a battle field!"

"No, baby! My balls are right here, for better or worse," I shouted, standing. "So why don't you try to take a bite out of them, or shut your mouth before you piss me off!"

"That's the way your kind of guy operates. If you can't fight it or fuck it or drink it, it don't make sense," he said to my back as I walked up the aisle. "All you fucking madmen."

"Whatever I am, I'm not a mental masturbator," I tossed over my shoulder as I swayed on to the front of the bus, opening my beer.

The anger burned tight and hard in my stomach, pure and hot as it was before a fight. Morning would have fought me but would I have him? Telling myself that it was in the name of friendship but, as always, thinking myself a coward for backing away from the fight for whatever good reasons. If you ever worry about being a coward, you can never convince yourself that good reasons aren't rationalizations to save inner face. A poker game started in the back of the bus like an embarrassed cough, and I guzzled my beer and ate my guts. Fear is the act of running away and bravery, that of running forward: they are not abstractions. Yes.

The bus passed through an area of jungle, dark, limitless foliage which marked our passage with a few stirred leaves like the splash of a castaway's bottled message on some distant sea. Only a few villages huddled against the flicker of the highway in the vast wilderness, breaking the solid wall of trees.

I knew this country. Both the American and Japanese invasions had followed this route from the beaches on the Lingayen Gulf. The dense mass of green had long since consumed any sign of the invasions with its mad twirling vines. Even on the beach only the code name, Blue Beach, and an occasional rusted piece of unidentified metal hinted of the past violence. So time and the dumb growth healed the scars with the slightest of efforts, but that day, that burning day, the ghosts forever uncured spoke to me, summoned me to their bleeding sides. Did I hear a monkey's cry, frail in the rushing wind? Or the endless scream of a man trapped under mortars exploding in the trees above – a shriek which echoed through the cave of time? The bus crashed over a bridge, and something flashed above the brown water. A bottle curving toward the creek? or a hand sucked down for the last time, the millionth last time, fingers arched not in a plea but in defiance still? I knew, I knew. The past, history, memory, had always waited for me like a specter. My memory never knew the chains of time. I had walked the peaceful grounds of Pittsburg's Landing while ragged men fell at every step. I wandered under the shaded sun on Elkhorn Tavern as cannon spoke and cannon answered and men cried into stained faces. I stood motionless on the Upper Brazos as six Comanches took the hair of a farmer and his wife and child, then climbed calmly on their horses – all drunk, three bleeding, one dying from the farmer's stand – riding back to the Staked Plains. Yes, I saw, and forever will see, the ghosts of men dying, and as I saw I understood, despite the protests of the fallen themselves, that it was heroic, was perhaps the last noble thing.

I wanted to shout it to an indifferent, cowardly world which had, in the name of Utopia, forgotten Valhalla. Or perhaps I only wanted to say it once to myself to be sure I still believed. But I remained silent in the clatter of the bus, thinking myself a fool, a dreamer whose visions were the nightmares of mankind; a fighter not for peace but for eternal war. But I could not stop: I had seen things I could not forget, and remembered things I had never seen. For me the two Siberian armies still stumbled across the snow as they encircled the Germans outside of Stalingrad. There had been no sound track on that film clip, but I had heard them cheer. Flat-faced Siberians ten thousand miles from home, fighting for Russians they didn't like against Germans they didn't know, because it was right for a man to die well, to stand and not run, to fight and perhaps die. But victory is not the only face of war. I also remembered the sad German faces – starving for weeks and freezing for longer – numb with capture, waiting to march further than they had meant to with 107,800 going, and waiting still longer for only six thousand to march back. But the losers did not really look that different from the victors as they marched away to more freezing and fighting and stinking and enduring. I saw and remembered, and God forgive me, thought it noblest of all.

But that was then, riding toward the sea, when I was ashamed of being a warrior.

I dozed fitfully into the city of Dagupan, thankful not to dream, but the bus stopped in the city so we could buy more beer and ice and fresh bread from a little bakery Morning knew. I had no need to leave the bus, so I waited in the heat, watching the town, the corrugated iron roofed, wooden buildings decked with soft drink signs; the people scuffing about in Jesus boots or wooden clogs, seemingly never entering the buildings. Almost all of the buildings were unpainted, but the wood – perhaps because of its own sturdy nature or the heavy, washing rains – refused to look untended. The skin of the people seemed to be the result of some inner brownness, as if their flesh might be earth colored and their bones as delicately hued as ancient ivory keys. There was the brown dust of dirt you find wherever men sweep it out of their houses, but it wasn't filth. That came when the twentieth century god of progress managed to sell itself to the have-not's as salvation, and as a result killed the best of the old society with its worst. If I had asked the teen-aged Filipino outside the bus window, the one with a transistor radio plugged to his head, "Is this progress? These things steal your dignity at the price of your pride." He probably would have answered, "Yeah, man, yeah!" I didn't ask him; and no one asked me.

The others came back from their errands, and we drove the five or six miles to the beach. The bus stopped in front of a large pavilion marked by a neat, freshly painted "JOHN'S," surrounded by the graceful bows of coconut palms, and sitting on a slight rise above the beach and the estuary. Morning greeted the fat Filipino, obviously John, with a true lover-of-real-places familiarity. John, who I'm sure misread Hemingway too, returned the salutations like a true good fellow. John was a fat man who looked very uncomfortable being obese, as if remembering thinness and mourning its passing. He was also queer, and stocked the pavilion not only with a small café, sari-sari store, and a score of weathered tables, but seven or eight Billy Boys in partial drag. Morning introduced me as Sgt. Krummel, Trick Chief, so for the rest of our stay John called me Chief. But he was not nearly as bad as he sounds. His eyes did join his thin smile with some warmth, and refused to shake hands in deference to his sex, as if to say, "I have my boys!" He introduced his boys, Violet, Rose, Magnolia, etc. His place wasn't as out of the way as Morning had led me to believe.

The Trick rented the largest of the nipa huts on the beach and I, childishly, took a smaller hut near it. I wanted to stay away from Morning. The bus drove the couple hundred yards to the hut, but most of the guys walked. I stayed behind to have one of the boiled crabs Morning had talked so much about.

The pavilion overlooked a tidal slough fed through an ankle-deep cut to the estuary. Across the tepid water ten nipa huts dotted the scrub grass at the edge of the beach. The largest hut was the last one on the right, and mine next to it, separated from the water by one hundred yards of the loveliest beach in the world. Its shining white arms stretched open in an embrace of the flat, shimmering sea from the mountains distant and hazy on the right, then left across the estuary to that wavering point where sea, sky and sand fused into invisibility. The pale hot colors, the faintest whisper of a breeze on my face – surely it must be a miracle, I thought. Voices came, faint and silly in the heat, playground sounds lilting from some past.

Quinn, child of bricks and alleys, had taken off his shoes and danced about the hot, packed sand, chasing a small gaggle of domestic geese at the edge of the slough. Pete, remembering his grandfather's farm over in Michigan, shouted a belated warning to him. The gander had already snaked out his long gray neck along the sand, spread his wings high and wide behind his head, and was racing toward a laughing Quinn. Quinn jumped and grabbed one leg as the hard red bill whacked against his ankle bone. While he tottered, rubbing his ankle, the gander retreated slightly, regrouped, and charged again. Quinn tried to lift the other foot and, in drunken amazement, fell down, his open mouth lost for the sound of laughter not his own. Pete shooed the gander away with a stick which he then had to take away from Quinn who was shouting something about killing that goddamned bird.

The gander, noble fellow that he must have been, ignored his fallen enemy with a champion's poise, puffed out his magnificent breast as if to receive a medal, and with a measured, heroic step herded his maidens in the opposite direction.

The next day Quinn loudly claimed that those bruised lumps on his ankles were from the bus ride and that he hadn't been looking for brickbats at all but for his cigarettes. But his protests served him not at all; he quickly became "Goose-killer, son of Goose-egg." The name would fade into the night of half-remembered much-embellished war stories told to the folks back home, when it would be revived as anything from "Father Goose" to "The Great Gray Goose." The spirit of the nickname would survive even that distant future when graying heads would be scratched in search of "that crazy guy's name that got bit by a goose."

Watching Quinn and Pete walk away, I constructed the legend while waiting for my crab, rolling the cold beer bottle across my forehead, watching the small fishing dugouts slide over the glassy sea.

John brought my crab shortly after the field had cleared. I explained that I had never eaten crab before, and asked if he would show me how to break it open. He seemed oddly pleased. I supposed it was good as crabs go, but like a man it carried its skeleton on the outside, and resisted my prying attempts beyond death. I finished clawing, paid a sullen Billy Boy whose mascara had run in the heat, and sauntered to the bus. I picked up my gear, the book Morning had recommended, and a basket of beer. Then, as I said to myself, I, lord of the manor, retired to my chambers peacefully content to dream of past victories and future conquests, not at all sorry I hadn't bunked with the others.

Morning woke me at the very hottest part of the afternoon.

"Hey, animal, you want to take a swim?"

My neck and shoulders were slimey with sweat and the bed was wet underneath them. I poured the half-finished beer through the gaps in the bamboo-strip floor, shut the novel without marking the three pages I had read, stretched slightly, and started sweating again.

"Too hot, jack."

He waved two coolie hats and two wine bottles with the straw bases cut off and explained that we were going swimming because it was too hot. After a bit I realized that he was trying to apologize, so I rolled off the lumpy mattress and swapped my shorts for a swimsuit while Morning hummed "Meadowlands." I followed him into the sun which filled the sky like a malevolent overcast above the pristine reflector of the sand. The water, a pale even blue, seemed flattened by the heat, compressed into a level sheet of glare marked only by slight irregular swells which died half-noticed against the baked finger of sand like faint pulses. Morning and I joined the others and sat neck deep in the water, cooled in it, shaded by our hats and anchored by the wine bottles tied to our wrists. As the heat of the day continued and the wine expired we drifted around the point into the estuary as the panting tide came in like a tired runner. In spite of our elaborate defenses, within the hour our bodies resembled water-logged bread crusts dipped in wine. Novotny, Morning and I sought the mottled shade of a fishing village up the river.

We found a bit of shade under the village pavilion where a wedding reception was in progress. The Filipinos had seen us walking past, called to us and, laughing and patting our sun-tendered shoulders, invited us in for a beer. We should have felt foolish attending a wedding reception in swim trunks, but their greeting was so warm, so unpatronizing, we felt truly welcome. It has been a long time since any stranger had a friendly word for us, and these short, happy people embarrassed us with their warmth. Beer and sweet greasy roast pig and purple rice and fried chicken were pressed upon us with champagne smiles. They were humbly polite, turning down the rented jukebox to introduce us to the milling crowd, but also shared their laughter with us, even at us in that fine way old friends have. An old withered man kidded me about my beer belly which had grown like a tumor since football season, and I returned the favor with a motion at his egg-bald head. His face disappeared into a mask of wrinkles, and a happy cackle flew from his toothless mouth. I shook hands with the now joined families, then with the slight, handsome groom and his shy bride who hid her smile with a dip of her head. I sailed once more into the tumbling maze of people. Each way I turned, smiles bloomed like flowers photographed in time-lapse; brown buds of faces burst into blossoms under the sun. I spoke with a man who claimed to know all about Texas, about cowboys and Indians, and when I told him that I was both a cowboy and an Indian, he laughed and laughed until tears rimmed his eyes. I didn't know what was so funny but I too laughed, even harder than he, so hard I abruptly sat down, and he wailed off again into breathless mirth. We ended both sitting and giggling and holding each others shoulders until the last seizure passed, then smiled and parted.

I rested at a table, sitting next to a white-headed Filipino. He looked to be fifty or so, but his hair was full and bushy, his face firm and his body held in a vigorous, controlled strength. He wore a starched light-blue pin-striped shirt like I remembered my father wearing before the war, and a dark-blue pair of trousers which obviously belonged to a double-breasted suit; but his shoes were brand new, a stiff almost metallic brown, and he had sat them on the bench next to him as if displayed for sale or trade. His dusty calloused feet, broadened and toughened by too many barefoot years to count, splayed across the packed dirt under the table. He nodded politely, but neither smiled nor spoke. He mixed a drink: one part Black Dog Gin, one part orange soda-water and one part beer poured into a thick water tumbler. He drank hunched over the glass, slowly, like a man on a long road between drinks. I watched him and his ugly feet which clawed the earth like stubborn toads, then finished my beer and walked away.

In ten minutes I was back, sitting across from him, smiling and inquiring, "How are you today, sir?" He had moved his shoes on to the table.

"Fine, thank you," he said, looking up. The voice was as worn and rough as the skin of his feet. "You are in the Army?" he asked. His tone was soft and deep and weary, his English exact.

"Yes, sir."

"That is good. I, too, was once in the army," he said, staring back into his glass as if time were telescoped there. "A very long time ago, during the war. The Japanese took my sawmill and I went to the hills to fight with Colonel Fergit on Mindanao. I was a major."

I wasn't surprised: I hadn't yet met a Filipino male born before the war who did not claim to be a guerrilla. (But no one had even heard of the Hukbalahap rebellion of the fifties.) A restaurant owner in Angeles, a woman, had told me, "They all lie. They hide in the hills and call it fighting. They should be a woman and learn about fighting."

The old man pulled a battered wallet from his pocket and showed me a picture of himself, three other Filipino officers, and General Douglas MacArthur. Other bits of tattered paper were taken from the leather sheath: his college diploma, folded and faded, showing his degree in civil engineering; pictures of the wife and children killed by the Japanese in '43, and his sawmill, and part of his outfit; his commission and various citations; a membership in an engineering society, dated June 2, 1936; a smudged dollar bill with the fuzzy red ink signatures of all the Americans in the band; a barely recognizable snapshot of Betty Grable's ass. He laid his very life out before me, faded, flaked at the edges, torn in the creases, scattered like wasted time around his new shoes. In a voice as ragged as the edge of a shell-ripped jungle, quiet from too much whispering, he explained how he had been cheated of his pay for the five years of fighting, shorn by crooked politicians and apathetic Americans. He told me, an American, but the blame and bitterness held a very dull, chipped edge in his voice.

"Ah," he sighed. "So long ago. So very long ago."

We both understood that he had just told me that he was a Huk, a member of one of the few remaining small bands of roving bandits who operated with little or no pretense of any political means or end to their banditry. I wondered if he had been on the raid the night before, wondered if those were his comrades we had killed.

He stowed the captured fragments of time in the wallet, then exposed his right calf. A mottled stitching of a machine gun wound scarred the leg. An old, smooth scar reflecting the unforgotten pain, pain compounded in nearly twenty years of running and fighting and dying after it was supposed to be (it had to be!) over. I remembered the blasted body of the night before, thought of wounds never healed to scar.

He and I talked until dusk, even smiled twice more together, then gravely shook hands as if over the coffin of a common friend. He tucked his gleaming shoes under his arm and walked toward the mountains in the sunset, his white hair waving like a flag of a forgotten truce in the strengthening breeze off the sea, and tiny mushrooms of dust puffed between his misshapen toes.

That night and the next day swept past like the waters of a rapids; our pleasure and peace leaping and laughing over any discontented rocks we might have brought to the beach. Once a fierce yellow sunset drifted into a delicate green, lime-aired dusk. The gentle surf crested in the quick darkness with swirling phosphorous fringes of tiny animals like liquid silver. Under the black water the shining protozoa loomed like little lights into our eyes, then curved away like speeding cars. Long careless daylight hours were spent watching the chameleon in the thatch of my roof, and he observing me with the same lazy indifference. I slept once in the window-box at the large hut, too drunk to walk, peaceful among the deep sleeping noises, the shimmering ribbons of light reflected on the slough. From the pavilion across the way laughter and the ingratiating whine of the jukebox wound over the dead water as Quinn, Morning, Haddad and some of the others danced drunkenly with the Billy Boys until fat John turned out the lights. A mosquito buzzed me, but a breeze off the gulf chased him inland. I must have slept through a shower, for when morning came my clothes were damp. I swam in the sunrise, disturbing for a second the still, perfect sleep of the sea, then washed from a sand well, and breakfasted on coconut and raw fish, and watched the sun creep like a sly snail up the early morning blue. I wondered aloud why anyone would ever leave this place.

That night we took the bus into town and went to a whore house.

It was a tall, nearly three-story shell of mud and straw bricks. The whitewash had peeled away like scabs to expose older and more flaky coats. The ground floor was open and cluttered with the usual assortment of cracked tables, bamboo chairs, bar, and bubbling jukebox. Over the back half of the room a jumbled maze of bamboo rooms climbed all over each other toward the roof. The small cubicles were stacked in a random association, each seeming to have no relation to any other, nor as a whole any connection with the outside walls. Halls and stairs and landings went off at every angle as if an abstract expressionist had decided to become a carpenter. A drunk might wander up there until he was sober and still be lost, passed from giggling whore to giggling whore forever.

The girls who stood up when we arrived were of a very provincial sort, either indecently young moving up in the bonded hierarchy of whoredom, or absurdly old, having fallen to the last layer. The Trick, except for Morning and I (he because of his peculiar brand of romantic puritanism or puritanical romanticism, and I because of my… rank?), didn't seem to mind and fell to seducing them in wholesale lots. Cagle sat on the lap of the largest professional in the whole PI, and acted like a ventriloquist's dummy to her great pleasure. Morning and I drifted to the rear where a solitary woman was shuffling a deck of cards under a bare light bulb. It was still early and there were no Filipino customers in the place.

"Okay, man," Morning said, "that's for this one."

"Don't be in such a rush. Your old sarge may have something to say about that, young trooper. That's your problem, kid, too big a hurry." He laughed and walked up to the table.

She had the delicate features – the thin, well-bridged nose, small curved lips – which spoke of some Spanish blood, but her body was squat, full and still firmly stacked in spite of the twenty-nine or thirty years of use. She would be shorter when she stood up than we had thought her to be. She wore no make-up and dressed in a simple black jersey and slacks and no shoes.

"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.

I was ready, I thought, but not for the knife in David's hand, a balisong, a blade with a split handle which folded over the two cutting edges, a sort of primitive switchblade. David opened his slowly as if it were an old friend in his hand, laid it edge-up on the table, and motioned to his two buddies sitting behind him who no one had noticed coming in. They looked like something out of an L.A. rat pack, and one was slipping another balisong from his pocket.

"To make losing more fun, man," David said with a sly grin on his face.

"Not me, man," I said. "I only play for marbles and match sticks."

"Sure, man," he said, closing his blade and waving his troops away. I noticed that my troops had gathered, and wondered at all this fuss for a fuck. "Just putting you on, man." Like hell.

The knife had chilled me, had scared me in a way I didn't like to admit, but it made me madder than hell, too. It was back in his pocket, but the challenge still gleamed in his arrogant smile, and his shadow lay flat and stark against the tabletop like an echoing slap. He reared his forearm on the table, strong and supple and slightly weaving in a hypnotic dance. I matched him to the murmur of a muffled "Get 'em, Slag-baby," to Haddad's voice wailing like a street vendor as he took bets. I placed the brown of my arm, white against the brown of his, in the circle.

"Let's put a little bread on it, man," he said, snapping his fingers. I shook my head, knowing as he knew: whoever lost, left.

Our hands clasped, separate fingers carefully placed, molding a primeval bond. Morning held the hands as David and I eased into the clasp, then stepped back and shouted "Go!" No fancy stuff, no waiting, no more playing around, I leaned into his arm as if trying to shove him out of the universe.

I should have known. What match was primitive cunning and arrogance against the enlightened rage of a civilized man? I should have known. White, paunchy middle-class American that I was, I was also the boy who had dug ten-thousand post holes before I was eighteen, milked twice that many cows, and lifted how many countless pounds in how many curious ways for the past ten years to retain that initial strength. Fed on eggs, fattened on steaks, nourished in the land of milk and oatmeal, was it any wonder I slammed a skinny Filipino's hand to the table, ending with the same motion I began?

Before the echoes of David's hand on the wood stopped, I already felt silly, even guilty in the sudden quiet. He slowly flexed his hand, staring at the sliver of blood which split the middle knuckle. He grinned wildly and said, his bop-talk gone, his accent heavy, "We play your game, motherfucker, now we play mine."

He stood up, kicked his chair away, flipped the table from between us, and opened his balisong in a nickering, sickening twirl. The instance charged into my mind, clear and stark as if time tripped again. I saw everything with an incredible vision: the writhing crowd making room; Novotny's aghast face; Teresita waving frantically at the bartender; an old whore already crying; Morning's perplexity. All the figures as clear and distinct as if I had sculptured them, molded and cast the panorama of the stricken crowd. A crystal drop of sweat paused in its race down the side of David's face. If I could have held that cleft in time, God knows what flaming stars, what nights of space I might have seen – but for fear. But I couldn't have seen those things at all, for even as David moved, I stood as swiftly as he, and as his blade held the light, my chair already flew toward him.

Ah, poor David. He might have sliced me into slivers, but he had no luck. The chair leg, four pieces of wrapped bamboo, slipped past his raised arm and slammed into his mouth. He staggered back with a surprised pinch around his eyes, as if he remembered all the movie chairs broken on virtuous backs, then he stumbled to the side as if the world were spinning too fast for his legs. He fell, then propped on his elbow, lay on his side still amazed. When he moved his hand from his face, he exposed a bloody gap where several teeth had been broken off at the gum line. The stubby root of one still gleamed optimistically in the cavity.

This too was a clear picture out of the corner of my eye as I ran away, but I didn't realize what it meant until I bumped into Morning standing like stone next to me. I turned back, no more thinking now than when I had run, and leapt toward David as he tried to get up. His blade scraped in his struggles like a rattler on the cement floor. I kicked him in the ribs, then stomped his hand, and scooted the knife away. Behind me I heard a crash as Morning and Novotny tore the legs off the table and cornered David's rats without a fight. David was up now, and I caught his staggering rush, blocked his right, then grabbed his arm and spun him toward the bar. A clot of spectators kept him from hitting the bar, and he was quickly up. But in the short spin I had heard the singing and knew where my blood beat. When he came, I was ready.

Did I cry? shout? suffer? I triumphed.

I panted over David and had an unbidden impulse from my boyhood to mount my foot on the bowed neck and wake the jungle with my call, and as the thought came and went unacted upon, I laughed away.

Back I came at the touch of Teresita's hand and the whisper of her voice, and found, on the far side of violence, desire coiled tight and hard about me. It's violent we leave that place, I thought, grabbing her arm and pushing through the crowd, and fitting and proper violent go back. She did not struggle under my hand, then valiant hand.

Once she slipped from my grasp in the scrambling people, but before I could reach back, she thrust up to me and I felt her swelling breast nibble at my arm. Across the floor and up the steps into the shadowed helter-skelter of rooms, our breaths breaking the air before us, we ran. At the first door I slapped the bamboo curtains aside and crashed into the room only to find the bed already occupied. Cagle rode like a monkey on an elephant's back among the acres of his bloated lover, humping away as if mere friction might consume the indifferent tons. Gripped in his saddle meant for no earthly horse, he rode, his hairy arms each wrapping a huge flabby breast, his tiny white ass flickering in the slitted light like that casual muscle it drove, while the unprotesting hulk calmly flipped the limp pages of a comic book above his burrowed head.

Teresita and I laughed and laughed, but hurried to the room at the end of the slanting hall, our impatient hands flying at each other's flesh like mad birds. She was naked and blood from a clumsy kiss ran sweet in our mouths before I could get my pants off; so I took her, damp and quivering, hobbled by my britches. She arched, bucked and achingly arched against me, reared like a mare in the chute, and the curve of her back embraced a void I must fill. And again she came from the bed, lunging up as if it were afire, and again she fell to earth, to earth and into the void beyond where our frail members hesitate to go; but I went with the proven strength of my back, swinging myself like a club, and I went like a child lost in a dark echoless cavern, and I went.

And then we were easy and slow and rolling but not over, and her breasts quivered hot as tears on my face as we began the effortless lope through the foothills toward the snow on the mountains, blistering white snow in our sun. And as we ran, time fled past us like a startled bird, a beating, hurrying flutter, and the beard grew on my face and the drying mud of the jungle stiffened my clothes and the stench of the battle mingled with the steady slow suck of boots in muck. A web belt encircled my waist and a canteen thumped at my back and I knew my weapon lay under the bed, my rifle in frightened reach as I paused this moment from the fighting, this moment so precious between the fear, so perfect and beautiful because it might never be again, for I too must someday play the vanquished… But I had the smoothness of now, and clutched it as I felt the first bite of the snow as the cold, cold heat gathered to burst pure white re-creation, white and hot as the snows we trampled.

But a shadowed voice, then a cackle of laughter intruded from the unfamiliar darkness, and in the pale candlelight, a hunched, headless shape fumbled at the curtain. I raced, oh I raced from the snow, down, down across the hills to the rotting, mucking jungle again, and a bitter scream escaped the aching teeth of my mouth, and I launched myself at the shape of my enemy, fell, jerked up my pants, then lunged again.

The door ripped away, and I clubbed at the figure. We grappled and rolled, bumping down the slanted hall, the blood thick in my ears, then rolled down the steps to the darkened floor. The whack of my fist in his chest (I never thought he had a head I might hit) threw him back, and in the light from Novotny's candle I saw Joe Morning sprawled like a bug squashed on the wall.

As Novotny explained that David had slipped away and cut off the lights, I clutched my crotch, moaning a thousand times. The pulsating mountain I reached for wasn't even a slightly quivering molehill, but a bag of ashes in my hand. The snows had melted, running into mysterious underground rivers, and however cold they might flood, they would not be the snow again for a long weary cycle of time.

Then Teresita was there, her slacks on backwards, a convexo-convex bit of pale brown flesh winking from the hastily clutched zipper, explaining to the police who promised to lock up David until his father returned. It seemed they had to do this every time his father went away.

So wan and tipsy and aching I gathered Trick Two, herded them to the bus, then said goodbye to Teresita.

"I'm sorry. Jesus Christ, I'm sorry."

"Yes. I too," she said, "as much as you. I will come to the beach tomorrow and we will look again." She touched my face with a gentle hand; her lips were fleshless skin under mine.

As the bus bounced away from the haunted whorehouse, Morning shouted up to me, "Jesus-shit, Krummel, you nearly broke my back. What did you think I was, that Jap ghost?" He laughed.

"That's okay, Morning. You only fucked up a wet dream."

She did come the next day, and it was good walking in the still dawn far down the beach to make love beside the easy swells breaking like whispers. She rubbed my bruises and kissed them. We swam naked, our laughter bright across the sun-sparkled water as we frolicked like silly children. Her heavy breasts scrambled in the water like puppies, their soft, wet noses nuzzling my chest. Once she lay on the beach as I swam far out, and when I came back, I almost cried at the beauty: the black gleaming span of her hair against the glare of the sand, the sweet melting brown of her body, the waiting blue of the sea, a rippled shower draping the mountains in a shimmering veil. I was naked man first flung from the sea, crouched humble over the sleeping paradise of woman. But pride, not of possessing her or the world but of simply and foolishly being a man, made me rise and look to the green mountains and across the faraway sweep of the sea… what for, my God, for what?

Later we watched the chameleon in my hut, then had a sweaty slide at love, and afterwards strolled the cooling sand as great rolling clouds piled up the horizon. When we said goodbye, we knew it was. (Though, of course, it wasn't at all.)

During the trip back to Clark, Morning inquired as to where I had been going when I bumped into him the night before.

"Looking for running room, mother," I answered. His face was hidden in the rattling darkness, but he was smiling.