One to Count Cadence

11. Abigail Light

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

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

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

"Joe, Joe, how are you?"

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

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

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

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

"There's just nothing left to fix, Krummel. Nothing."

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

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

"Krummel," he said. "I need you to help me. You'll help me, won't you? Won't you?"

"Sure. You know I will."

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

"Why?"

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

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

I met Abigail in the hall outside.

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

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

"What were you doing in there? You know him?"

"Old friends," I said.

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

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

"I shot him," I said, but she wasn't listening.

"Why is he crying?"

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

"Huh?"

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

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

"Yeah," I grunted.

"Yeah what?"

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

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

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

"Where are we going, nurse? Physical therapy in your apartment?"

"Just shut up and help me push."

As we topped the small ridge, we came out on a clearing, a bowl-like depression circled by the ridge. In the center a miniature Greek theater had been built by some bored but imaginative airman, but the rocks were rough-hewn and it recalled something more pagan, Stonehenge maybe. Terraces stepped up the sides of the amphitheater, alternating stone and flower beds, rough stone, exotic flowers, sensual pinks, lush purples, velvet reds and blues, and pure whites. Abigail pushed me down one of the walkways to the bottom of the bowl and stopped next to the stage.

"You're pretty heavy, fellow. I'm not sure I can get you out of here," she said, wiping sweat from her forehead with a bare brown arm.

"You mean we're stranded here?"

"You're stranded here," she said. "I'm not." Then she laughed and ran away, circling the small stage once, then she flopped on the grass, then rolled on her back and stretched. "Isn't it lovely."

"Gaudy as a goddamned Christmas tree," I said.

"Don't be cute," she said. "Admit you're dizzy with beauty, you're stunned with color, knocked out by the air, enchanted with the sky, and madly in love with me."

"It's all right, I guess," I said, smiling.

"Quit that," she said. "I mean it." She sat up, propped her arms behind her, slipped her loafers off, and crossed her ankles. "You never admit anything," she said, not smiling. "Just say it's lovely. Just admit that much."

"It's okay; if you like that sort of shit."

"It's lovely. Admit that."

"Okay, so it's lovely," I said. "So what the hell. Gushing doesn't make it any more lovely."

"I didn't say gush," she said, tilting her head back. (I would have cut my leg off just to kiss her neck just then.) "I just said be honest and not cute and not cynical and admit what is."

"Come off it, lady."

She looked up at me, pouting playfully. "Please."

"No."

She looked down and away, trying to hide a really pouting mouth, and in a small quiet voice asked again, "Please."

"You don't give an inch," I said.

"Neither do you." She rose, pulled the blanket from behind my back and, in a very methodical medical manner, spread the blanket. With a nurse's hands, neutral, efficient, she helped me out of the chair and onto the blanket; then she sat in the chair, held her hands as a child does when she prays, and said, "What are you afraid of?"

"Jesus Christ," I said, nearly shouting. "This is the most beautiful place I've ever been. I'm stunned and enchanted and dizzy, assaulted by beauty, the beast in me is soothed by sky and sun, appeased by flowers, beset by madness, etc."

She said nothing for almost a minute, then, once again between folded hands, "You didn't say you loved me."

I started to shout, though what I never found out, but she giggled into her hands, stood up, fell beside me, kissed me, then lay her head on my chest.

"You idiot," I said, holding her against me. But I let her be silent too long.

"You didn't say you loved me, Jake," she said, her words muffled against my chest.

I waited, sighed familiarly, then said, "And I won't say it either. I don't believe in love, baby. I'll like you, respect you, and cleave unto you all of my days, but I don't believe in love. I told you that when this started."

"It didn't matter then," she whispered.

"Why not?"

She rolled over, kissed me again, then said, "I only loved you a little bit then. Now I want you to marry me." She blushed, then moved away, and lay face down on the blanket.

I went numb. "What in God's name for?"

"I knew when I saw your face in the sunshine. You need me; I want you. I get out in six months, and I want you to marry me."

"Just be quiet for a while, will you?"

She closed her eyes, and I lay on my back watching the peaceful white clouds fluff the blue sky.

Abigail had been, in her early years, what is commonly known as a town punch, though she was never as promiscuous as she was thought to be – not virtue, but a lack of able candidates, she was able to laugh now. She admitted that she earned the title. Only daughter of a fat merry high school principal and a thin nervous English teacher with a love for Gothic romances, Abigail grew up torn between the castle of eighteenth century love and the battering ram of nineteenth century virtue. Her maidenhead had burst, of its own accord, when she was fifteen, and she slept with twenty or more boys before she was eighteen – dry, senseless pilferings in the back seats of cars. Her reputation followed her the twenty-eight miles down Route 6 from Marengo to Iowa City, and she fell into the sad pattern of repeating old mistakes, until she fell in love. A boy just out of the Navy three years after Korea, a drunk at twenty-two, dated her because her roommate was busy, and because he was more interested in drinking than fucking, and because she enjoyed the same thing he enjoyed, namely sitting by the Iowa River with an icebox full of beer. He found the shy lovely girl under the reputation. He drank less; she fucked not at all; love.

She told him; he suggested that they refrain to refute her past. Three months of happiness, then in January he, drunk, stepped through an air hole in the ice covering the river; the body wasn't found until spring.

She said she spent her weekends parked up there, sitting in the car in the midst of crystal winter, cold blue snow and a pastel sky, cursing, cursing her sin and her untimely virtue. She had no shell to draw about her, but she made herself be careful. There had been a college boy, two pilots, a dentist, and nearly Gallard, but none of them had come to anything permanent.

When she told me I should marry her, I couldn't decide if the knot in my stomach was fear or love. I believe it was love, now, but I couldn't decide then. My life had too many loose strings, and I thought I'd best be about the business of tying them without knotting them. And I didn't believe in love or anything.

"Can you wait and not push?" I asked.

"Not forever," she said, looking up then moving beside me, "but for now." She kissed me, her lips cool on my face, but in only an instant we flamed together.

"Cut it out," I said, "The cast's in the way."

"Nonsense," she said, and she was right.

Gallard came by late that night as I was making pencil corrections in the manuscript I had finished the night before.

"Through with that?" he asked.

"For now."

"May I see it. It was my idea, you remember," he said.

"How little you know, doctor," I said, holding the pages to my chest.

"You told Morning that I was a magician and that I would raise him from the dead. Obviously, you think I know a great deal."

"Will he get up from the dead?" I asked.

"The spinal column was bruised and pinched, in layman's terms, by a bullet sliver, but I fixed that. He'll walk when he gets over feeling guilty. I understand that you helped that today. Do you know what he is guilty of?"

I laughed.

"I thought you two were friends?" he said, puzzled.

"Joe Morning is guilty of being guilty; he's done nothing."

"Don't make riddles," he said, peeved.

"That's your game, huh? Here, take this mess. Everything I know about Morning is in here." I handed him the manuscript. "I hesitate to let you read it; it tells about me, too, and I ain't always pretty. You understand that I'll deny the truth of it, if you try to do anything about it."

"I don't understand at all."

"You will."

This was Joe Morning's first day.

Gallard took my manuscript, notes, journal, whatever, then left for two weeks in Hong Kong. He put Morning in a neck-high cast, promising that he would walk after two weeks of total rest. He also, after seeing the condition of my cast, took my wheelchair away for two weeks, promising me a smaller cast and crutches in a fortnight. One day of mobility, one taste of Abigail, and chained once more. They also moved me from my room into a ward (where I shall remain until the end) and Abigail and I could talk but not touch; but most of our talk concerned messages from Morning to me.

"He said tell you thanks," she told me the next day.

"Tell him he's welcome," I answered, slipping my hand down the side of the bed to clasp her thigh. She had arranged me with an empty bed on either side. Sharp girl.

"But he also said that you would have to take him seriously someday," she said, moving away from my hand, blushing, smiling. "You horny bastard. I'll have you arrested."

"Don't give them an excuse. They'll lock me up forever if they get the chance."

She fluffed my pillow, trapping my hand between her belly and my bed. "From what Pfc Morning tells me, you should be. He says you're a reactionary moralist at heart and that you believe in ghosts."

"Right," I said, pinching her, "but I'm a lovely guy anyway. Horny bitch, lieutenant."

"Don't hold it against me, sergeant. Rank has its privileges." She poked me in the ribs with a sharp fingernail. "And responsibilities. Good-day." She turned to leave, then handed me a letter. "Your mail." I recognized the handwriting. "Your stateside sweetheart, sergeant?"

"My, ah, ex-wife."

"Tell her she can't have you back," she whispered, then walked away.

"Hey," I said.

"What?"

"Tell Morning I always took him seriously."

"Tell her I take you seriously too," she said, nodding toward the letter.

The jealousy was nice, but the possessiveness worried me, but she smiled a little as she left.

I let the letter sit for a minute as I basked in the love of a good woman, then I opened it, ready for another bout with tolerance and political persuasion.

Dear Jake, she began, As you can see from the return address, I'm staying with your folks for awhile. I hadn't seen, though. I've come back from Mississippi to rest and my father wouldn't have me in the house. After the things I said to him after our divorce, I don't really blame him. I guess I don't blame anyone for anything any more. Just me.

As I said, I'm back from Mississippi, to rest. I was already feeling old – pushing 29 and childless is old – when I lost a bit of my fervor. (Politics is such a dirty business, in spite of the cliché, just dirty as hell, and I couldn't stand it forever.) Teaching was all right, in fact, I loved it. Fifty- and sixty-year-old women learning to read, even one seventy-year-old man, right in front of your eyes. Jake, it was great. But the other side, the cold planning of who will get their head broken in nonviolence this weekend, and who next. I stayed out as long as I could, but Dick talked me into it.

We tried to block a registrar's office, marched in front of the court house door until they moved us with cattle prods and billy clubs. I never thought they would hit the women, but they did. I fell down and rolled to the sidewalk, but the girl next to me, a lovely girl from Ohio, was hit on the side of the head. Her ear split right in half. I pulled her behind the court house, tried to stop the bleeding, then went for help.

I couldn't get anyone to help, no one, white, Negro, no one. Everyone was screaming and hitting. No one.

When I went back two Negro boys were dragging her between them across the street and into an alley. I thought they were trying to help, so I followed, but when I got there, they were raping her. She came to long enough to try to fight them, then to cry that she would give them what they wanted, she would give it to them, she would love them, but not now when her head hurt, not now. They cursed her, then told her that they didn't want her to give them anything; they'd take what they wanted; then one of them began slapping her while he was on her.

I ran back into the street, grabbed three white men, and screamed at them, "Those niggers are raping her, a white girl, raping her." The white men stopped them, but they also beat the Negro boys so badly they both had to be hospitalized. Dick had the white men arrested for assault, and tried to say that they had attacked demonstrators. The girl from Ohio refused to testify, so I did, and the men got off. Dick called me an ofay bitch, and I caught the next bus home.

Baby, I'm confused. Please write me, please see me when you get home. You used to make such good sense to me. I won't ask you to forgive me, but please write.

She went on, inquiring about my leg and the plane crash, recounting news from home, wishing me a quick recovery, and a speedy trip home.

What do you do? All the good memories came back. The breathless dizzy kiss after a football game, the summer afternoons on the banks of the Nueces watching a scissor-tail and a squirrel argue over the live oak above us, the first time she read Kafka and the lovely perplexity wrinkling her nose as she said "I don't understand it but I like it."… What do you do?

"Write her," Abigail said after reading the letter. "She sounds lost. I hate it, but write her." She looked down the ward, the other casualties, the dismembered kid, both legs and an arm lost to a mine, the two blind ones, the one with no face, five with bullet-scrambled insides, three crazy with malaria, one with a virus fever no one could diagnose, assorted missing and broken limbs, and me. "Write her. Men don't understand what they do to women. You're all bastards." She arranged a smile on her face, then walked to the next bed.

I wrote that confusion must be a condition of growing older, of seeing more, of living, because I must confess to confusion too. I promised that I would see her when I got home. I told her that I was in love with a sweet girl, and thinking about marrying again.

"You can tell her that you love me, but you can't tell me," Abigail said when she read my letter. "Why?"

"It's different, that's all."

"Sure," she sneered. "This way you don't risk anything. You keep her from hoping and you keep me on the hook." She walked away.

I tore up the letter, then didn't know what else to do, so I put the pieces back together and recopied it.

Late the night before Gallard was to return, Abigail came while I was sleeping. I woke with her fallen on my chest, her mouth against my ear, her tears on my face. I held her.

"Jake," she sobbed. "I'm sorry. I'm a fool. I want to break your leg again, keep you here. I love you. I won't push."

Her mouth was wet and rubbery with gin against mine, hot, hungry; her teeth nipped at my lower lip. She had been to the Club with one of the younger doctors, but had slipped out into the night and run all the way to the hospital.

"And I'm drunk," she said, sitting up.

"That's okay; I'm asleep…"

"And having wonderful dreams," she whispered. She stood up, her hands smoothing the wrinkled white linen dress down over long tight thighs. "Please," she whispered, then left, quick and graceful with pride, hips swaying slightly with drink and heat. "Please."