One to Count Cadence

8. Manila

Oh, if the comedy were only divine.

I, of course, select things to leave you with, but I must try to tell the truth, too. How nice if you retained, say, a picture of Slag Krummel swinging like a pagan, rioting, raping, lusting all over the place, or perhaps even Jacob Krummel, naked above nakedness, on a primeval beach, contemplating original sin as his woman beautifully sleeps. But, no, you'll remember the way Morning made my voice vulgar in the darkness: You only fucked up a wet dream.

I have so few illusions; he robs me even of those.

But, by god, I'm having the last word here (which may be why I'm having any word at all), and if you are going to persist, and you will persist, you bastard, you will even endure, in remembering me stumbling across that darkened room, torn from the greatest fuck of the decade, my pants heaped around my ankles like a burlesque comedian, then I will also joggle your memory, aptly, of course. Whatever sort of harmless fool I played, it wasn't me courting madness across that drunken lagoon, dancing with sweaty, sad Billy Boys, their make-up running off their eyes like cheap dolls left in the rain, it was that devil-may-care Morning. In his case the devil does care; Morning had an awful attraction to self-destruction, moral, physical, sexual.

I say this so you will remember that he did interrupt me. How odd, how odd the sexual connections we make. We all sleep in a circle.

Abigail kissed me this morning and I cupped a tiny breast fluttering like a baby chick in my hand. I strain in my bonds. Morning interrupts me again. I interrupt myself. Time is the interruption of space, or is it space, the interruption of time.

How silly I'm getting in my old age. How silly.

After Dagupan a strange uneasiness captured me. So much, so fast. The raid, then touching Teresita, and quickly now snips of rumor that the 721st might go to Vietnam, a persistent and persistently ignored rumor for the past months. I was ready to believe it, ready to go, ready for anything, I thought. I began staying apart from the Trick, spending my breaks and all my money in Manila. I soon squandered my savings. Teresita was lovely, long, and sweet, her body strong under placid skin, her pubic hair silken and straight, her love satisfying, and expensive. Moving once again away from commitments, as I had when I reenlisted, I made her take money for her love, made her eat the bitter grass. And when the money was gone, I wouldn't go to Manila. This is not counting the seven hundred or so I'd won on the long restriction. Not a penny of it had been spent or even touched, but it abided in the form of figures in my savings book. A reserve, but for what I wasn't sure. Morning had been after me since the restriction to let him use the money to ease us into the black market. My capital, his contacts, and he guaranteed to double it within the month, but I wouldn't turn it loose. Not saying anything derogatory about Haddad, mind you, I just didn't fancy myself as a black market czar. Enough money for my woman, my beer gut, and me.

Haddad had really done well on the market. He was well-suited to the business of business, generally no better or no worse than the average American businessman, and probably better educated than most. He wouldn't cheat his friends; he was at least a political liberal, though economically he was of the buyer-beware school; and he was the only person I'd ever known who had read all of Proust. I think that may be the secret to his soul. He would work hard, and he saw the making of money the art one prepares his life for. God, he loved to make money, not for what it would buy, nor for power, but just for money. Plus he had imagination; and he never cheated me. If I could have convinced him to play the profit game, keep enough to live on and play again, and give the rest away, he would have been a better sort. But he said, very seriously, that the tax structure was such that… well, you know. But he was free with his money and when success laid half-ownership of a bar in Town in his hands, he planned an opening night party for the Trick. It was really a fine bar, an old Spanish home, two stories, set on half an acre of grounds, and it would have been a fine party… but it was Good Friday, April 12, 1963.

Good Friday, Karfreitag. Day of suffering, prelude to resurrection, day of judgment, epilogue of life. Good Friday?

We were on Break off a set of mids, in Town by 0730, drunk before 1000 and off to see the flagellants. Blood has always sickened me slightly, but I felt it was something I should see, or Morning convinced me it was something I should see.

They were at the edge of Town in a small and, as far as we knew, nameless barrio. Those flagellants who, during ordinary years, made their homes in Angeles made a point of arriving back home on Good Friday; they were joined by a few weekend worshippers. A year spent dragging a heavy ironwood cross around, across Luzon, had built a scum-brown callous on their shoulders, down across the blades. Pain, spiritual anguish, and living on the charity of their brothers had seeped away the flesh of their faces, swelled the bones of their bodies, mottled their eyes. And here they lay their crosses down, not on a significant, bald hill, but among scattered nipa huts, on a dry, dusty street thick with stray dogs, rooting pigs, occasional chickens, and watched by the vaguely religious, the curious, and the sick. The Lord, their Father, refused them even the relief of a single cloud to intercede with the dry, parched heat of the sun, refused a single drop of rain, even the tiniest breeze. But the sky was split asunder all the day by passing jets tearing their angry tails of thunder behind them. The three, for this year there were only three though Morning said there had been twice as many as the year before, arrived slowly, singly, denied even the friendship of suffering, stopped at the end of the snaking path marking their trail. The path, if followed backwards, would lead you across the plain, through the heat, into the jungles thick with steam where the sun sucked the very moisture from the leaves, and through the jungle to the mountains thrust up in the earth's time of agony, up trails which hung to the steep slopes with the uneasiness of mists. Up and across the highlands, past men with filed and betal-stained teeth who buried their dead sitting in clay beehive huts, past the missionaries who were telling these same men about Jesus' suffering, but these same men laughed at those foolish devils carrying about wood not even good for fires, laughed, and sometimes killed them, and the missionaries too, but always with a laugh. But these had made it, and except where the monsoon or the casual passing of other men erased their marks, you could follow them backwards. As they came and eased their burdens to the ground, their backs bent in habit, they took up branches and whips and, with the same patience and calm with which they lugged their crosses, began to beat themselves without pause for food or drink; striking the sinful flesh until welts, then blood, rose from their skin. An occasional onlooker would join the devotion, until his sins were washed away too.

And above, jets tolled the sky.

"Such peace, man, on their faces," Morning said as we watched, a basket of beer at our feet, shame in our eyes. "Wonder if it's the pain, something in the pain?"

"Inflicting or enduring?" I asked, but he didn't answer.

We watched and drank ourselves into a bright haze; watched until blood splattered in the dust at our feet. A single bright drop, as small as a tick, nestled in the sun-blond hairs on my arm. Almost without a word, we left. The word: Jesus Christ.

Before Haddad's party, we attended the middle-class Good Friday: all the suffering endured by statues. A long march of wax and wooden and plastic Christs, wooden pain, plastic blood, and little boys in white robes. Though the streets were thick with bodies, the only sound was breath, shuffle of feet, click of beads, a silence of shame more than reverence. Those other three, fools, yes, still out in the darkness, still bent under their own blows, wailing sinful flesh with enfeebled arms and enhanced determination, the blood syrupy and thick with flies against their wounds.

Haddad's party, had it been the end, would have been the perfect climax to this odd day. We ate a good dinner prepared by Toni the sad queer, good filets and beer in the old master bedroom on the second floor, but Haddad had hired sad, naked whores to serve in high heels and long white gloves. He expected the last course to be love among greasy plates patched with parsley, but the girls were so ashamed of their nakedness – for what he paid them to do this, we could have fucked them in the dark ten times, and had enough change to get back to Base – that they lost any appeal they might have had. What he'd meant to be old-fashioned revelry became a quiet mean drunk. Not all his fault, though, I'm sure. The religious violence twisted all our faces like a cheap mirror.

Toni had to flitter about the table seeking compliments, snatching feels, his soft hands patting shoulders, his tired voice pleading for good opinion. Surly as we were, we weren't even polite. "Okay, if you like shit," Quinn said. "You should love it," Morning said, and Quinn answered, "I'd rather eat shit than cocks," then they both stood up. But I, with my love for the dramatic moment, hurled a beer bottle between them and it exploded on the wall behind. I told them to sit, and they did. God knows why; ordinarily I couldn't get either one of them to do anything. Maybe they thought I was going to kill them; they might have been right. But the winds blew again, quickly.

Toni squeezed Novotny's arm once too often, too lovingly. He stood up and hit Toni full in the face with such a painfully happy smile, I had to answer it. But Morning came around the table swinging, and there was a brief moment of fists glancing from hard faces and skulls, bouncing off shoulders and tensed arms; but only a brief moment, then I plunged between them like a fullback making his own hole. Morning fell against the table, scrambled, then the table collapsed. He fell among broken dishes and spilled drinks on the floor. Novotny had stumbled over Toni's inert body, and fallen also. As I turned, I grabbed a heavy oak chair from under Peterson, and said with a smile:

"You boys stay down, or I'll bust you wide open. Either one, or both. No matter."

Novotny was willing; he was already ashamed. Morning was less willing, but no less ashamed, so he stood up, shook his head, made a vague gesture with his arms, then walked quickly out. He had a glob of mustard hanging from one haunch, beer sloshing in one shoe, and baked potato in his hair. A ruined exit.

I held the chair cocked, and felt for an instant the crushing need to demolish something, but paused in soldierly soberness, and lowered the chair. "Fuck it," Haddad said. I threw the chair through the French doors which led to the small balcony. A great lovely crash as doors and glass and chair plunged to the ground outside. Haddad was smiling when I looked at him.

"Is it deductible?" I asked.

"The fucking world is deductible, Krummel," he answered, then threw his chair toward the open windows. It hung in the drapes, but he ran over, grinning as if he had just cut costs ten percent, rubbing his hands like a Jewish pawnbroker, and tore down the drapes, wadded them in the chair, then heaved the mess away from him. The troops were right behind him.

In a mad flurry of laughter, everything in the room flew out the window in less than a minute: table, chairs, table cloth filled with stale food and dishes, a brocaded settee, a rattan couch. It made no sense, but it was great fun. Collins grabbed what steak knives he could, then tried to stick them into the papaya tree. Quinn tried to throw a still inert Toni out, but reason prevailed, for a moment. Later we discovered that he had rolled Toni up in the carpet and heaved him into the papaya tree. Only his feelings were hurt. He never came around us after Good Friday.

When the room was bare, absolutely bare except for the whores huddled against a bare wall, hoping we wouldn't throw them out, someone, Quinn I think, began tearing his clothes off and throwing them out the window, sailing them into the night wind. The troops followed. (I tell this as if I were not there out of a natural sense of modesty.) In a moment, nine mad soldiers sat their bare cold butts on the tile floor and drank beer with six much more at ease whores. Laughter and drinking and one thing led to another. The only moment of any note to anyone but ourselves came as drunk Cagle fucked a small middle-aged whore on the floor. He would poke her, she would slide, he would crawl after her and poke her again, and she would slide away again. Around the floor they went, two complete circuits before he cornered her, lodged her head against a baseboard and, in finishing her off, nearly knocked her brains out. Everyone in action took a smoke break to watch this new pornographic position. We called it the Cagle Crawling Fuck, or How to Get Scraped Knees While Falling in Love.

The destruction of the room had cleansed us of hate and fear and pretense, had left us only laughter and our bare skins, more than enough for salvation. We died in violence, but were resurrected in laughter.

Downstairs, after the party was over, we found Morning slumped against a plaster column, one arm around the chipping evidence of more ornate days, one hand clutching an empty bottle of TDY rum. Infirm, blind, perhaps even dead, someone suggested. We sacked his slack body behind a couch, out of Air Police sight, then settled in, since it was still quite early, for, as Quinn said, more and more serious drinking. Not that we were sullen, but that we just drank all the time anyway. We understood it was an evil poison, causing madness more often than not, but it was our way through the mask, and nothing else seemed as appropriate.

But other winds were blowing…

Over in the 9th ASA the mood must have been just about the same as ours. The troops had planned a company roll call for the Saturday night after Good Friday. Not a Trick Roll Call, which was bad enough (bird colonels had strokes etc.), but a Company Roll Call with over three hundred men signed up, solemnly pledged to take part in the Roll Call, Riot, and General Disorder. The company officers, sly as officers often manage to be, had broken wind of the event and planned, secretly, to close the pass box Saturday morning. But the foxes smelled the dogs' shit, and moved the roll call to Friday night. Thus, in a very direct way, the Good Friday Night Riot was caused by the officers, sly devils, of the 9th ASA, and in an indirect way by Joe Morning, professional innocent.

You see, still other plots were brewing…

Cagle, only an EM but silent and devious, had chanced upon a funeral procession the week before, a silent line of pallbearers, candle carriers, road guards, and the corpse laid out in a fine white lace shrouded coffin looking for all the world like a big giant birthday cake. He inquired of a professional candle carrier and discovered that the coffin had been rented from the local undertaker for a very small fee, considering the immoral beauty of the frilly pine box. This night he rented this lovely coffin without a word to a soul, and returned to the steps of Haddad's place, ten holy candles in hand but no smile on his face, solemnly saying, "We must bury Joe Morning before morning; we must bury our dead before they stink." We tittered, but he silenced us with a frown stolen from an assistant undertaker in Kansas City. And as the coffin was filled with the body, then shouldered in the dim light, we became as silent as mourners.

And so we formed: pallbearers six, Quinn, Franklin, Levenson, Collins, Haddad, Peterson; road guards two, Novotny, Cagle; and one to count cadence, Krummel; the corpse we carried, Morning; tears in our eyes, pride on our drunken faces; fuck all the rest.

We marched to the measured beat of a dirge, pagans bearing the fallen to his pyre, the coffin level with the pallbearers' shoulders, candlelight and lace flickering in the night. It seemed for an instant, or longer perhaps, as we marched that we were as sad as if Joe Morning were really dead, as if we understood that he had been the best of us all, the most damned of us all, the most damned and the best. Step, pause, mourn Joe Morning, and move, solemn, silent, drunk, our homage paid. With each slow step the earth sank beneath us, tears plied our distant faces, and we knew no hope of resurrection, and tears plowed the dust of our faces. Lord knows where we might have ended that night, our sadness was that great. I headed us where I might, Cagle and Novotny stopping taxis and jeepnys and calesas at every corner, leading down dark rutted off-limits streets, past cribs where blankets separated the struggling pairs, past bars where card games stopped and beers paused between hand and mouth; into, into and through, the labyrinths of the market, among slabs of meat nailed by rusty hooks, where this morning's fish became tonight's garbage, through the darkness, and finally out at the blazing light of Chew Chi's kiosk, jammed as it was to the walls with the 9th ASA, mourning things of their own.

They poured out behind us, two hundred fifty strong. I picked up the beat to the usual 120, and the dirge became a roar, anger, mirth, carnival, death. My men sang, their grief gone:

We are Krummel's raiders.

We're rapers of the night.

We're dirty sons a bitches.

An' we'd rather fuck than fight.

And the ASA was singing, to the tune of the old Western, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon":

Behind the door her father kept a shotgun,

He kept it in the summer and the merry month of May.

And when I asked her father why the shotgun,

He said, "It's for her lover, who's in the ASA.

ASA! – Suck! suck!

ASA! – Suck! suck!

He said, "It's for her lover,

Who's in the ASA!"

Suck! Suck!

As you might remember, about fifty thousand Filipinos also called Town their home, though we often forgot. On Saturday night they would have expected it; on an ordinary night they would have been unhappy, but not too angry; on Good Friday, man, they went insane. The police switchboard, the Town switchboard, and the Base switchboard all jammed at once with irate calls and threats of international incidents and war. With the telephones down, the Air Police, using radios and intelligence, formed up with the Town fuzz, and came to do harm to us, racing toward the market with about forty jeeps, and six hundred sirens. It came to me that I was slightly out of place at the head of this mob, but it also came to me that I belonged here more than with the law, I was more my Trick's man than the Army's. So I gave the only order, they tell one in basic, which will stop a marching company in less than two steps: GAS!

The troops dispersed, rats down holes of darkness, and when the law arrived, they found only innocent Joe Morning asleep in his coffin. The jeeps circled once like a band of raiding Comanch', then sped after the shadows, but they were only shadows fleeing from their headlights. I, as an eyewitness, can categorically state that any damage, except to religious sensibilities or to shinbones fleeing through the night, was done by this marauding band of jeeps. There were four accidents within my hearing. A lone late arrival flying around a corner in the edge of the market clipped the side of the sari-sari store under which Novotny and I were hiding. The whole corner came off, the small building tilted, and Cagle rolled off the roof. He hit the ground running, and by the time the jeep turned around Cagle was singing, "Ho, ho, ho. You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!" and in a flash, he vaulted a fence and disappeared, leaving a bewildered AP behind him, shouting to an empty street, "Stop or I'll shoot – I guess he got away."

Morning fared as well as any of us. The APs woke him in the coffin, asked him what the hell he was doing in a coffin, to which Morning answered, "I'm dead, you dumb fuck." They wrote him up for conduct unbecoming a member of the armed forces. "For being dead and kidnapped by vandals, they give me an IR?" Morning said to a harried Dottlinger the next day. (Capt. Saunders had gone back to the States again.) Dottlinger took his pass for seven days, saying, "Lord, I don't know what's happening in this world. I just don't know." For the seven days without pass, Morning became a national hero. All over Base: "Hey, that guy there. He was the one in the coffin!"

No one else was caught or connected with the march. Hardcore Townies just were not caught by Air Policemen, and we were all professional Townies. There was a period, shortly before the Huk raid, which I haven't spoken about partly because it wasn't really important and partly because I'm somewhat ashamed of my conduct during these few weeks. Cagle, Novotny, Morning, Quinn, Franklin, and I would sit in the market after curfew, drinking beer, daring the APs to come in and get us. They never touched us. In fact, I'm the original Gingerbread Man. I had to relax sometimes. Dottlinger gave me foul looks, and Tetrick commented, "You guys are all going to get killed someday, and I'm gonna laugh like hell," but I'd learned from Morning how to play innocent too, so I did. The United States Government picked up the damage tab, as it should have: foreign affairs are strange and expensive adventures.

Okay, so we desecrated a holy day, insulted the people's religion, tore up the American image abroad, but what the hell; everyone already hated us when we got there. We ran with pimps and whores because nice Filipino families and their daughters spat at us on the street. Since we were not officers, we were scum, so we said to the world in general: suck. Suck to the good folks of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Kileen, Texas, Ayer, Massachusetts, Columbus, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, etc. You name it, baby, I've been there, and it ain't good. Maybe soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, deserve the treatment they get. Maybe they've earned it. But soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, aren't any worse than the people they have to deal with, and most of the time they have to deal with bastards. Morning, Novotny, Cagle, none of my guys, not even Quinn, were Ugly Americans. When they were told that they had to pay the price of all the bastards before them, they said, Shove it up your ass, jack; we didn't make the world, baby, and we ain't paying for no mistakes but our own. I know I'm sounding like Morning (what an admission), but there are a lot of people in the world who should be dead. Morning said Hitler had the right idea, but the wrong criteria. My hate isn't as deep as his was, probably for good reason, but I almost agree with him.

And, too, what we had done that night – and I say this without apology – affirmed, said, shouted that men, even the most ordinary of men, will sometimes, in whatever way they can, refuse to be part of the system. In the defiance of that night, we bought back a bit of our individuality; shouted, as Quinn had shouted that night, "They can kill you, mother, but they can't eat you!" Goddamn, Morning never learned that. He knew they were always going to eat him alive. I know they'll never take me alive. Goddamn, goddamn, sometimes I miss him. Sometimes I do.

But relief is never a moment away.

It was all downhill after Easter, we said, not knowing quite how we meant it. I grew fat, fatter, slimy and oily in the heat, sucking beer after beer, crying, it didn't matter. And the money, too, down, down. In desperation I gathered a week's leave to spend with Teresita in Dagupan on the beach, but we both caught colds the second day and squandered most of my leave in fever sweats, sneezes, halfhearted love, and stale, gamy sheets. To recover, we fled back to Manila on an air-conditioned train to spend two days and nights in a luxury hotel. That helped, but on the second afternoon I refused to give any of my quickly vanishing money to a ragged beggarboy. Terri and I stupidly fought, and the whole leave was lost in anger.

Back to work. Air conditioning goes blink; major goes mad; repairman short circuits the whole Det, leaving the Head Moles to rage in sticky darkness, rage at me until I actually beat my head against a wall. At 1645 I left it in the hands of the next unfortunate, Sgt. Reid. He'd shucked his wife but hadn't found happiness, and his face killed me each time he relieved me. Then evening chow was ham. We had ham, frozen ham just this side of rotten, eighteen times a week. That could be endured. But the nineteenth time busted it. "You must have miscounted," the mess sergeant says. "Don't make mistakes," say I, handing him my plate. I sat in my quarters, the buttons on my khaki shirt straining to hold back the flood of beer gut jammed behind them. Sweat covered me, not running, but drifting like an oil slick. A Coke, I thought, I would have a Coke. Change in my pocket? No, only keys to doors behind me. Surely I had ten centavos somewhere. Less than a nickel. After fifteen minutes I came up with an old one, green with mis- and dis-use, lodged in the watch pocket of a pair of Town pants which stank like sin. Down to the Day Room like a kid after the ice-cream wagon in August. The damned machine (oh, foul machine, I ran astray of you before) took my last ten centavos silently, made no acknowledgment, gave me no cold Coke, made no apology, refused categorically to return my money. I hit the son of a bitch in the mouth. Bull-assed bastard of a machine. I shook the damned thing until Tetrick raced in from the Orderly Room to pull me off.

"What's wrong?" he asked. I don't believe I'd ever seen him concerned about me before.

"Lay twenty on me till payday," I said, and without a word he handed me two tens.

The Trick carried me back from Town that night. The next noon I took the seven hundred out of the bank.

Morning and I moved into the black market in high style, capital behind us, untold riches ahead. We bought cigarettes in the barracks for seven pesos a carton from the troops, made a run each break to Manila, carrying the cartons in the back of an AP's 1948 Dodge, and sold the cartons of Chesterfields and Salems for eleven pesos. One hundred cartons, four hundred pesos, between $135 and $150 U.S. depending on how you changed it. We also carried twenty new stereo albums, which paid well too. We had several people on our payroll, buyers in other outfits, two APs, a Manila drop man, but we still cleared about one hundred dollars a break. I usually spent my fifty in Manila, as did Morning, but the seven hundred stayed in reserve. Ah, we lived well… but it didn't help a thing.

Krummel, fatter, meaner, more sullen each week. Morning, more anxious for violence, for change, for something. The Army, far from being the peaceful sanctuary I had sought, had become more complicated than civilian life. Black markets and beer, and love once again, of a sort, and the Vietnam rumors flying again. I began to hope, then chided myself for being a dumb drunken lifer just waiting for a war, but still I hoped.

One Break after a set of mids, Morning and I were half asleep after the beers we'd had on the drive down. It wasn't quite noon, but it was hot as hell outside the hotel. I was waiting for him to go make the drop, deliver the two large suitcases sitting between the twin beds.

"You going to make the drop, Joe?" I asked, feeling like a bad movie gangster.

"You do it, man. It's too hot outside," he answered. We had been through this scene the last trip. I didn't know what was bugging him, and he wouldn't tell me.

"I don't know where to go. You know that," I said, my eyes closed in the cool conditioned air.

"Yeah, I know," he mumbled. "I'll tell you."

"That's your part of the deal," I said. "Remember."

"Well, why the fuck don't you do something, you fat lazy bastard," he said, only half in jest. "Swill beer like a pig all day."

I opened my eyes. He had sat up and now faced the windows, his sweat-stained back toward me. "What's up?"

"I'm just tired of doing all the work. Taking all the risks."

"I'm tired of you bitching all the time. I put up the money; you run the operation; that was our deal." I sat up to open the last beer.

"Krummel, you and your…" he said as he turned, "… commitment shit.

"Well, fuck, take the last fucking beer, too, why don't you?" he spat at me.

"Eat shit," I said, and left.

The Golden Cave, in spite of its name and reputation, was a rather ordinary looking place, a two-story house hidden behind a stucco wall in a residential section. The grounds were nice, and the large banyan trees kept the noise from disturbing the neighbors; best of all, though, were the girls and the central air conditioning; they commanded a price. It was run by a small sad man, an ex-priest, a homosexual who was writing a book which, he said, would give the homosexual a place in heaven, if not next to God, at least near the more compassionate Jesus Christ. I often drank with him while waiting for Terri to finish with a customer upstairs. He was good company, never pushy, and he ran a good, tight bar and whorehouse. But he was still unhappy about being disrobed by the Church. It seems he often used the confessional for more than a place to talk. He had knocked all the walls out of the lower floor. The low ceiling gave the place the intimacy of a home, the big room, the freedom of a house.

Terri was having a drink at the tables back near the bar with a fat, somehow familiar man when I finally drank my way to the Cave that long afternoon. She saw that I was more than a bit drunk, and her eyes tried to wave me past the table, but I was in no mood to be waved off. I walked past, then peeled back behind her to put my hand on her neck. She smiled, frightened; her partner frowned, disturbed, and I answered both. She introduced him as a Mr. Alfrado Garcia, the owner of several bars and houses down by the stockyards in Pasay City, a section where a night on the town usually included waking up naked and half dead in one of the blood gutters the next morning. A big, fat man, his eyes almost in the back of his head, a greasy smile like a dimple in his face. Was I that fat already? I asked myself. Of course not.

"Garcia," I said. "A Spanish name, huh? You don't look Spanish."

"I know we haven't been introduced yet," he said, ignoring my insult, "but I do know you." His voice sounded like a sulphur bubble rising in a mud pit, or like cow shit falling on a hot rock, and his face contorted in a jolly fake of a smile.

"Yeah," I said, walking behind the bar for a beer, "I know you, too. Next time don't bet against winners." He was the guy who had dropped several thousand pesos against my thirteen straight passes at the Key Club back during the long Coke bottle restriction. Terri followed me, got two beers for them, and when her back was to Mr. Garcia, her mouth formed "No, Jake, baby." I acted as if I hadn't heard.

"I usually don't," he said. "That's why I'm rich today. I usually don't. But perhaps if you had made one more pass… perhaps."

"But I didn't. The wise man knows when to quit. It's better to be wise than rich," I said, sitting.

"Exactly as I would have said," he chuckled. "The wise know when they are beat." He reached across the table to pat Terri's right breast. "Yes."

I should have killed him then, but I said, "That's not what I said."

"How is it that a sergeant can live so high?" he asked, the sick dimple sinking again between his fat cheeks. "Perhaps the black market? Now, I have some connections. One could eliminate the middle man. Chesterfields might bring twelve-fifty, perhaps thirteen pesos a carton. Something to think about."

"You can buy her, if you can, jack, but I'm not for sale," I sneered. Terri flinched, but said nothing.

"I didn't mean…" he started.

"We both know what you meant. What you pay for, fat man, I get for love." Which wasn't quite true, but it could have been.

"He who loves a whore would sleep with his mother," he said, calmly.

I assumed he had a pistol in his back pocket under the baggy barong tagalog he wore.

Heat forced its way from my guts to my neck, but I only said, "At least one who sleeps with his mother has one. One can't sleep with a monkey, then call the offspring Garcia."

He tried to stand, but I pushed the table into him, then rolled it over him, and when he got his hands free from table and chairs tumbling on him and reached for his back, I kicked him in the stomach. His hands came back, but he tried to kick at me lying on his side. I kicked him on the inside of his thigh, then, when he moved his hands, kicked him in the stomach twice more, then leaned over to get the pistol. He waved a feeble punch at my head, but I chopped the inside of his arm, and he quit. I took the gun, an old pearl-handled.38 automatic, threw the bolt, chambering a round and cocking it. Terri stood out of the way, crying, saying, "No, Jake," over and over. Holding the gun in my left hand, I stood over him until he tried to sit up, mumbling curses and threats. I chopped him above the ear. His jaw fell open on that side, and he stopped even trying to talk, but lay back down again.

"Get up, you fat mother-fucker," I said. "You lay there, I'm gonna shoot you in the guts, then drop you in the bay. Right there," I said, and kicked him again. A line of spittle and puke crept out the side of his mouth. He was finally afraid now. "Okay, fat boy, I'm going to let you go now. But I want you to remember something." I had learned enough about Manila minor gangster operations from the ex-priest to carry this off. "Remember Mr. Taruc at the Yellow Bar. Remember how he liked to knock soldiers in the head, then drop them in the blood gutters. Remember. You will also remember that last month someone shot Mr. Taruc's legs off with a Thompson as he stepped out his bar door. Remember that. But he wasn't dead. Two Molotov cocktails did that. Did you hear how he burned, did they tell you what color the flames were, did they tell you how he smelled? I know, fat boy – he was fat too wasn't he – I know because I did it. Mr. Taruc doesn't knock American soldiers in the head any more, does he? My sergeant and I stopped that. Remember you're fat, you'd burn well too." I went on, mixing up a story Tetrick had told me about a real incident in India after the war with the late lamented demise of Mr. Taruc. I think he finally believed me. Worst of all, I think Terri started to believe me. Mr. Garcia left, wobbling like a man after a bad accident, leaving me to clean up my own mess behind him.

"Why you do that?" Terri asked, as I got a beer. "Why?"

Everything spilled out at once. "Why? You want to know why? The weather, the Army, my screwed up life. You want to know something worth knowing, ask me why I didn't kill him. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to blow his fat, ugly guts all over the bar. But I didn't. Sometimes I get unhappy. Sometimes life is too much. Why? Why? I don't know why." I spoke mostly to my beer bottle, then took a long cool drink from it.

"You sound like Joe Morning," she said, seemingly far behind me. "Most time you are gentle man, Jake, but today you have kill in your heart. I sorry for you." She was crying; I could tell without looking around. I'd heard the sound before. "He offer me one thousand pesos a month to live with him," she said. "I am. Goodbye." She walked out after Mr. Garcia, but stopped at the door. "Maybe I keep him from having you killed," she said.

"You've been seeing to many American movies," I said without looking up.

She went on into the afternoon sunlight wearing the same black pants, the same black jersey, the same lovely bare feet soft in the grass. And I knew exactly how her breasts rippled under the jersey, knew exactly the animal smell of her body, satin skin over a cat's muscles, the way her legs climbed my body when she really wanted me, the night rain of kisses after she came. She was right, I thought, but I couldn't help thinking, What if I'd let him kick the shit out of me? Would she have stayed? No matter. It died aborning, conceived in violence, buried in hate, how could it be love? Once more Krummel loses to a loser. How fucking quaint.

I finished my beer and left. There was no rain as I walked back to the hotel down the stinking bay front. No rain. Nothing so conclusive as that.

Morning was still in the room, but drunk now, and the two large suitcases still sat heavily in the center of the room, not treasure now, but a sad burden.

"Off your ass, trooper. Let's sell some cigarettes."

" 'Bout time you did some work around this place, fella," he said, rolling off the bed to call the drop man.

The drop man came for us in an old Chevrolet. He was small, nervous, and in a hurry. Usually the transaction took place in the moving car, but he said it was too late and he needed to pick up the money at another place, so he drove us to Pasay City and parked in front of a wood and thatch house on a narrow dirt lane. Morning and I carried the suitcases in the house as the drop man hurried off down the street, explaining that he had to pick up the money. A tall, busty broad in a red dress met us at the door, laughed huskily at the weight of the suitcases, asked us to sit, then, in the same voice, the voice an American mother might use to ask a child if he would like cookies and milk, asked us if we wanted a quick blow-job. I said, thank you, no, but Morning asked, How much. Nothing, she said, A customer service, and laughed again. "Isthey inkstay," I said, "Let's cut," but Morning said "Onay," then followed the chick into the bedroom, her big legs rustling against the red satin of her dress.

Inside, he later told me, she stripped him quickly, laid his clothes on a chest at the foot of the bed, then undressed except for her bra, and went to work. With her body hiding his pants, the floor opened, or something, and one hundred sixty pesos disappeared from his wallet, leaving him, as Filipino thieves usually did, enough money to get back to Base. Morning asked her to remove her bra, but she just laughed, and spat against the wall, he said.

After ten minutes or so two men in loud baggy sport shirts walked in the front door. I stood, expecting anything. Neither of them were the drop man, but both looked like cheap hoods. My first thought was that Mr. Garcia was about to have his revenge (which may or may not have been true; if true, he revenged himself on Joe Morning, not me; a refreshing change, if true).

"You are off limits, you know, GI Joe," the younger of the two said. "You could get in bad trouble, GI Joe." His voice dripped threat.

"I'm in a private home, Jack, and my name isn't GI Joe, and just who the hell are you?" I said, the fire of fear and anger blooming again.

The older man looked on in disgust, then took out a battered card in a plastic case from his hip pocket, slowly, though, so I might mistake it for a gun.

"Pasay City Secret Service," the younger said, meaning, as I knew, a fancy New World name for the vice squad. Once more, slowly for effect, "Pasay City Secret Service."

"Spartanburg Mickey Mouse Club," Morning said in the doorway, tucking in his shirt. "What the fuck's up?"

"Talk nice, GI Joe," the younger said, flashing his card, too, which was only in slightly better shape than the other's. "We have report that two crazy stupid American GIs down here in off limits place. Bad place. Very bad. American GIs come here by mistake, sometimes have bad trouble. Sometimes fall down die. Sometimes," the threat now clear in his tone, then doing a silent movie double take, he saw the suitcases, "Those belong you, GI Joe?"

"Maybe. What about it, fuzz?" Morning said, his voice cool with anger now. "You boys fixin' to stir up a hornet's nest," he said in his best Ku Klux Klan voice, but they didn't understand.

"If not yours, then must be mine," the younger cop said, a fat grin on his thin face. This was getting silly. The older one was stocky, looking a little like a cop, but he was still small, maybe 5'7", 155, and the younger one was even smaller. And they wanted to take on the pride of the 721st. I didn't know if they had pistols or guys outside. One or the other though.

"They're mine, bud. All mine," Morning said, quietly, turning his left side to the two cops.

"Then captain must see," the younger said, smiling still wider, playing the game to the hilt. "We will take to captain, yes?" but not a question at all.

"How?" Morning said. "Just how?"

I looked for something to swing, but the room was furnished with a single rickety wooden table and chair, a cheap vinyl couch, and a whore's altar, plastic saints, nickel candles, and a slant-eyed Christ. Nothing a dissatisfied customer might get a purchase on.

The younger cop, smiling like a Buddha now, slowly raised the bottom of his gaily printed shirt, revealing the butt of a nickel-plated.45 stuck in his waistband. "Take it off, honey," he said, then did a bump and grind.

"Ease off, Joe," I said. "They'd love to shoot us in the backs and say we were resisting arrest. Keep your face to them, and your mouth shut, and we'll be all right."

"You shut your mouth, joe," the younger said, dropping his shirt back over the pistol as if he meant it to be a dramatic gesture. "This not California. You not mess with Beni Boys now," he sneered.

While Morning was looking puzzled, I got mad again that day. "You're not too smart, are you?" I said. "That gun's in a bad place. A good fast man could break your neck while you're reaching for it. Your partner might get him. But that ain't going to put your head back on."

"Hey, man," Morning said, smiling, too, now. "Don't scare the little man; he'll blow his balls off going for that cannon."

The younger cop suddenly looked afraid, then bent into a slight crouch, but the older one said to him in Spanish, "That's enough. Go to the car, now. I will talk now." The younger one didn't look happy, but he moved. As he reached the door, I said, "Si muchacho. Tu padre lo dice get out." Tex-Mex, but he understood and started back, but the old one waved him off again.

"You speak Spanish?" he said, turning to me.

"No, man," I said.

He turned to Morning and said, "You boys shouldn't talk to him like that. He's really a nice kid. He's just got a quick temper. He really likes Americans." His English was very good, his voice quite naturally kind. "Now, if you…"

"Don't pull that buddy-buddy shit with us, man," Morning said. "We've seen as many movies as you."

"Your friend is quite a wise ass," the older cop said to me, no longer even faking kindness. "You should teach him to keep his mouth shut."

"Nobody likes a cop," I said. "Particularly a crooked one."

"Let's go," he said, motioning us out the door. "Bring the cigarettes."

"Oh, the little shit told you they were cigarettes, huh?" Morning said as he picked up one suitcase. "Tell him hello from me, will you, when you pay him off. Tell him I'll have another drop next Break, huh? A big one. A cement overcoat in the bay."

We followed the silent cop out the front and into an old jeep, gray and rusted, touched with a thousand dents. The younger cop sat behind the wheel, smoking a hastily lit cigarette, posing tough. He drove us through more crooked lanes for about ten minutes, stopped once at a call box to prepare the station for us, then took the longest way round to the station house. Morning and I carried in the suitcases and set them on a desk in an office shut away from the rest of the large wooden room by glass, then the cops took our names and our valuables, our belts, and Morning's shoe laces, and afterward locked us in a wooden cage in the center of the room, across from the glass office. No place to sit, the floor, smeared with shit and vomit, too filthy to sit on, so we stood, waiting, saying nothing, watching the other occupant of the cage, a ragged drunk curled in a corner who never moved the whole time we were in the room, so still he might have been dead waiting to stink. We might have smoked, but the cops, the two who had brought us in and five or six others, were quickly demolishing our cigarettes in front of the booking desk at the other end of the room. The booking desk, like the one in the office, still bore the marks of whatever American military unit had used them before they were released for surplus. I shouted about the cigarettes, but one of the cops told me to smoke my toe, whatever that meant. If it was an insult, it didn't work because it gave us a terrible case of nervous giggles, which relaxed us more than any cigarette. Morning shouted back to ask if it was okay if he smoked his thumb because his toe was empty, but the cops missed the joke.

In about an hour a tall neat man in a barong tagalog came in the room, neatly combed hair, neat nails, and a dapper line of moustache. He nodded as he passed, as if we were casual acquaintances, spoke to the man at the desk, then walked in the straightest line into the glass office. Two different cops came, handcuffed Morning, then led him to the office. For five minutes there was a quiet businesslike talk, calm motions, thoughtful head movements, but Morning began, it looked like, saying no, no, no, in more fiery language. He stood up, and though I couldn't hear him I could tell he said Bullshit in his best voice, allowing no argument. He was handcuffed again, not roughly, but forcefully, and taken outside. Then they came for me.

"Sgt. Krummel, I believe it is," he said, reaching out a hand as they removed the cuffs. "Capt. Mendoza, second in command of the Pasay City Secret Service."

I didn't shake his hand. "Where did they take my friend?"

"Just to an outside cell. He will be all right. I didn't want him making any more, how should I say, bad blood with the two sergeants who brought you here." His English was very neat too, but he sounded like an insurance man making a pitch for increased coverage, or a Bible salesman.

"Just talk straight, huh? What's your price? What's it going to cost us to get out of this fairy tale?"

"Oh, everyone is in such a hurry today. But it is late, and I, ah, shall we say, have a lady waiting. So to the point. If you had not made my two worthy sergeants quite so angry, we could arrange some sort of deal where I, ah, would purchase your cigarettes at a very small loss to you. You pay seven for them on Base, I would pay you seven. You would be out nothing but your profit and expenses, and be much the richer, as they say, for the experience. A very small loss, indeed," he said, pausing to offer me a cigarette, which I didn't take.

"A small loss?" I asked, "or a shakedown?"

"Oh, such a crude term. I would have expected more from an educated man," he said, lighting his Chesterfield.

"Educated?" I said.

"Oh, yes, I know about you, Sgt. Krummel. I've known Teresita for many years. A lovely woman, as they say, yes, indeed. I've known about your business for some time. I also heard about your unfortunate encounter with Mr. Garcia this afternoon. He is a pig, but he could be dangerous, yes, indeed. As they say, I have my ear to many walls, yes, and you might call this a tax, a luxury tax. And the small loss you speak of so heavily would indeed be small compared to the price you would pay if you force me to call the U.S. Military Adjutant. You will surely face charges, be, as they say, busted, and perhaps spend some time in the stockade," he said, finishing with a perfect smoke ring.

"But, as I said," he quickly continued, "that was before you two boys made my men so unhappy, so damned unhappy. Now, unfortunately, it will take only a gesture for you and your friend. You must walk out, forgetting you ever saw these cigarettes. You have reserve, surely, and it will take all of this to, as they say, grease the angry palms around here." There wasn't a trace of irony or of threat in his voice, but a slight note of sadness; the director of one company hearing about the director of another falling into a bad but not disastrous deal.

"My friend said no deal, didn't he?" I said.

"Unfortunately, yes. He's such an emotional creature." Another perfect smoky circle.

"Then no deal."

"Don't be foolish. You made a mistake dealing with such a, as you might say, small tomatoes for a drop." He rustled in his desk for a moment, then handed me a card, and offered me another cigarette. I took this one. "My address and telephone number. I also deal slightly in the market. When you make a run after now, call me. If you can boost your load to three hundred cartons a week, guaranteed, I can raise the price to eleven and a half. You will get rich; I will get richer. But you have to take this small loss. The younger man has, as you might say, political connections. A small loss. You'll make it up in a month."

"Did you tell my friend this?" I asked, blowing a ragged ring of smoke between us.

"Yes," he said, standing. As he walked around the desk the crease in his trousers lay as precise as a ruler edge, the shine on his expensive shoes, hard and brilliant. "And other things. Other things."

"And he still said no?"

"Yes."

"Then, no."

He sighed, then said, "You must be very good friends, indeed. Money can't buy friendship, as they say." He made out a receipt for the cigarettes, "But I think this is going to be an expensive friendship for you." He reached for the phone. "Good luck. Think about what they say, Money can't buy friendship."

"I guess not," I said as I left, cuffed again. They walked me out and lodged me in the cell with Morning.

"He give you that get-rich-quick shit, too?" he asked out of the dark corner where he perched on a bamboo cot.

"Sure," I said, sitting on the other after the two cops removed the cuffs. "I told him it was a great idea. Told him to go ahead."

"Don't try to shit me, Krummel. You told him to shove it right back up his crooked ass. Just like me." His words seemed very close to my ear, but I still couldn't see him; my eyes hadn't adjusted to the darkness. "Crooked mother."

"Where do you get off being so damned moral?" I asked.

"What we're doing is okay; what that bastard is doing is crooked. He's supposed to be a cop. And so what if we do have to deal with shit, at least it knows it's shit, like our lovely drop man, but that mother up there thinks he don't stink. Where do I get off being so moral? Shit, man, where does he get off being so crooked. So I told him to shove it," he said quickly, something, not fear, nor excitement, making his voice high and tired, almost a whine.

"And why? Why not take the loss?" I asked.

"Why? Because, man, I've been lied to, stolen from, and shit on for the last time. It's too much. Nobody pushes me around any more, man," he said.

"And how do you know I didn't take the loss?" I asked.

"Nobody pushes you around either," he said.

"No, I guess not," I said. "Guess not."

The adjutant had us out in an hour. In another half hour we sat with a bottle of black-market Dewar's – bought with my money because Morning discovered his loss – in the hotel. I was very numb, but tired too, and the Scotch seemed to run to my legs and weaken them, divide the very cells holding the muscles together. It seemed I should feel more, something more, anger, rage, shame, something about the loss of Teresita and my stripes in the same day, but for now I was just tired. The rage mounted behind Morning's unfocused eyes, but I was just tired.

(The night Ell left with Ron Flowers to go to his apartment, after Ron and I had argued about going to Mississippi for the summer project, and he had drawn the switchblade he had carried without using since he was ten, and I called him a nigger, then broke his arm, saying, "I will not be pushed"; after Ell left, saying, "You don't need me. You always win. You just never lose. I can't stand that," and I crying to her back fleeing through the door, "But I thought that was what a man was for," and my voice echoing in the empty hallway, "was for," and the past tense striking me like a boot in the face, and the loneliness clawing in on quick feet, not just Ell gone, but the world gone from me, and I screamed into the empty hall again, "But, baby, I'm losing now. Goddamn, I'm losing, and the losers are winning, and goddamn, baby, I don't know why," and I cried for a bit while curious fools peeked through cracked and darkened doorways, then I sat in the living room all night, drinking; I was just too damned tired to move.)

I left the table once to pry open the window, to flee the conditioned air, but found only the stink of the sea's dumb expanse, the growl of the streets, and a hot breath on my face as some tired mad hound raced toward me through the night.

"Money can't buy friendship," I said to the sweating dog.

After the first quart, we ordered another even though Morning was already as drunk as one man should be. He hadn't stirred from the table, except to take a leak, and he drank straight from the bottle. I had been as still as he, after trying the window, and may even have been as drunk, but I was silent, counting the blossoms on the flowered wallpaper, while he constantly mumbled to himself, his whispers like bees in the room, his hands flying about his face. And when I wasn't counting, I was just there. Sad and numb, the way it is when you catch a good one on the jaw and in that time between the fist and the darkness you float away from the world, consciousness unconnected, unanchored by pleasure or pain, just ether dissipating in the vacuum, tumbling through fire-streaked skies. But Morning's voice, now loud, grasped me from the whirling peace, sat me back on earth:

"Hey, man, you know what that mother said?"

"Who? What? No," I said, moving over to the bed, perhaps to feign sleep. I didn't care what any mother said.

"That crooked fucker," he grunted, "that head Dick Tracy."

"No," I said, my eyes closed, drifting.

"No, what?"

"No, I don't know what he said, and I don't much give a damn."

"Oh, yeah. Well, he said that broad was a Billy Boy, the one at the house. What a bunch of shit." He slapped the table.

"Huh?"

"The broad. The mother said she was a Billy Boy queer chomping on my root, man." He hit the table top again.

"So what. Who gives a shit. Queer, smear. Go away."

"I give a shit, that's who," he said, now hitting the table with his fist. "I give a shit. But it wasn't."

She had been a big broad, and could have been. I'd seen Billy Boys who looked more like women than men, and I wanted to go to sleep, so I said, "Could have been."

I thought he was coming for me, which woke me up, but he just sat at the table, pounding it until I made him quit, shouting kill the mother-fucker until I quieted him with a weak drink from the second bottle, which the bellhop showed up with in the nick of time. He blubbered until I asked him what was wrong.

I asked; he took the rest of the night to tell me; I shouldn't have asked.