One to Count Cadence

Historical Preface

It's funny how stories get around. Just the other day Captain Gallard mentioned that one about the car. He hadn't spoken for several minutes, but had sat, staring out my window toward the sixteenth green running his fingers through his curly hair. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, drifting far from the Philippines, all the way back to Iowa and his childhood, as he told me about the mythic automobile of his youth.

You know the story: the car, the big, fancy one you've always wanted and dreamed about, is for sale in a nearby city (always the city) for twenty-five dollars. They always tell that part first, as they told Gallard about this Lincoln in Des Moines. Then the eternal catch: an insurance salesman died in the car on some deserted road; died, then rotted, and the stench has seeped into the very metal. "And you know how death stinks," he said to me, hands in his hair again, those hands (farmer's hands, short and flat and strong, the tips of the middle two fingers on the right hand pinched off in a corn picker long ago), not at all the hands of a bone surgeon.

"I even saved the money," he said with a wistful smile. "But I didn't go to Des Moines. I don't know why. It wasn't the stink so much – no one would smell it but me as I roared up and down those gravel roads at night – but I couldn't figure out how to get a girl in it, and you know cars are no good without girls. So I didn't go," he said, leaning back and chuckling. "Didn't get the girl I had in mind either. At least not then." He laughed again, smiled, then let his eyes wander back to the golf course and the two girls working on the green a short way down the hill across the road. The two were short, stocky mountain girls, Benguet Igorots, hips wrapped in many skirts and feet bound in oversized tennis shoes. They resembled those foolish and energetic dolls with weighted bases which when hit always swing up for another punch. But that wasn't what I saw reflected in his eyes, not them, no, nor the bright green fairway fringed in dark pine, nor the city of Baguio misty and lost in the distance, none of these, but the long delicate snout of that mythic Lincoln.

In my not-so-distant youth the car was a Cadillac for one hundred dollars (even dreams are subject to inflation, I suppose) in San Antonio. A doctor, so the story went, had driven into the nearby cedar hills, then blasted a neat hole ringed with brain tissue through the top. I also dreamed, and also failed to follow, though not for so sensible a reason as Gallard. I was simply afraid it wasn't true, and I certainly didn't want to find out. I still hear of the car, though, as I'm sure you do. A Thunderbird in Los Angeles. A Corvette in Atlanta. A Jaguar in Boston. The cities, the cars change, but not those dusty boys in small towns, nor the dream. I'm sure of that; but no longer am I certain if we dream of the power and beauty of the machine or of the stink. Perhaps, and some say for sure, they are the same, but I don't know. I just know the dream is real. Somewhere back in America grown men – doctors, lawyers, corporation chiefs – waste their fluid into the metal, decay and drip, drip, decay and fall, so you and I might dream – and be fooled into a nightmare of death and a cold wind over an open grave.

Gallard doesn't care for me to talk like that, and when I told him how I felt about the dream car, he accused me of seeing all myths, thus God, as a conspiracy. When I answered "Certainly," he accused me of a lack of seriousness. I reminded him that only the day before he had said I was too serious. He maintained that both accusations were valid. "Do you see evil everywhere," he then asked, "or just reflect it?" (I remember Joe Morning asking me the same question once.)

Gallard cares for me, tends my mending arm and leg, carefully X-raying the leg once a week to check the pin. He claims the X-rays are really a plot to sterilize me, and I agree. But all this time he is really searching for another wound, a festering, dripping sore he thinks he smells. He hasn't discovered it yet; but I'll tell him someday. Like a sly old coyote around poisoned meat, he circles, retreats, holds his hunger. But soon the blood and flesh will be too much in his nose, and he must eat or go mad. Maggots purify an open wound, or so I'm told, and I don't suppose I'll really be well until the day Gallard eats the blood of my friend, Joe Morning, on these pages he gave me to record upon. "Therapeutic," Gallard calls it. "Madness," say I. But he is a doctor in the full sense of the word and he cares for wounds.

He smelled it quickly, perhaps even that first day I arrived at the Air Force hospital on Camp John Hay near Baguio. I don't recall very much about the Med-evac flight from Vietnam – a bulky pain in my whole right side, a forest of gleaming needles, a constant plain of white faces. Then the plane approached the island of Luzon. At first the land was a speck, then a dot, then it grew into a disturbing blot on the pure surface of the ocean, a green-black imperfection in a blue universe. Soon it became an eruption, a timeless monster raising itself painfully from the silent depths of the Mindanao Trench, slime oozing down its steeply ridged back, circled in a froth of white where the sea boiled at contact. Closer, I felt the aged beast must reach up for the plane and brush it away like a troublesome gnat, and I was afraid, again, choked and blinded by fear, but as suddenly as it came, the fright disappeared, the world tumbled back to its rightful place. Slime grew back to thick jungle, and froth eased into restless waves napping at the mountains' feet, and I… and the sleeper back to his grave.

Again awake as the plane approached Baguio, I glimpsed the stark arrogant mountains tripping and falling among themselves, tumbling into the waiting, self-righteous valleys, and then the soft plateau resting above the gigantic disorder. Everything spoke peace: the quiet green fairways trimmed out of the deep black of a tropical evergreen forest; the thousand dazzling blue-eyed swimming pools winking and glittering among color-dazed gardens and quiet homes.

But I wasn't fooled. I still crouched in a radio van where grenades had scattered death like flowers; still hugged a ragged, skinny old man with blood blossoms adorning his chest. Like all warriors come home, I wasn't sure where or when the fighting stopped, nor did I know the difference between night and day. Then eyes, coal-black and curious above a patient green mask, said, "Take it easy, son." And so, for the moment, I submitted.

Many drug-weary days later, while I was still silent, Gallard came to ask after me. When I didn't answer, he raised his eyebrows almost to the black curls drifting over his short, square forehead, asking again with his face. I nodded toward the casts on my arm and leg, toward the traction apparatus, and shrugged as best I could. He shook his head slightly as if to say, "Okay. Take it easy. I'll be back another time." A wise man, I thought, as he left.

More days with my eyes shutting out bare walls the color of clabbered milk, off-white, way off. The sunlight, rich and golden at the window, ran like rancid butter on those walls. My eyes closed often in self-defense, but found little peace in the darkness. Instead there were the visions, the dreams of a drunk sleeping in the chewing-gum filth of an all-night movie house, slipping in and out of scattered light and darkness until the shadows of his mind match, in a clever and evil way, the shadows on the screen. When he leaves, if ever, he has no memory of sleep. I had only the blank, white faces of false concern.

I ate the hospital's surprisingly good food, submitted to the daily rituals of bath and bed-change, took their shots when they gave them, and endured in painful silence when they didn't. "Is man such a stranger to agony that he must hunt for the Garden with a needle," I say to the two nurses who drug me, Lt. Light and Lt. Hewitt. One laughs; the other thinks it is a famous quotation. Lt. Hewitt once said to an orderly at my door, "Battle fatigue," and shook her hollow head. I laughed, an obscene, barking bellow. Lt. Hewitt, or Bones as she is known, smirked and quickly left. To tattle, I supposed. Regulations permit only Death and doctors above the rank of captain to laugh in this hospital.

Gallard came soon afterward and asked after me again. Silence had begun to bore me, but I wasn't ready to talk yet. I wanted him to really want to know, so I said:

"Curious instruments aren't the keys to Heaven, sir, nor for that matter, to my heart, either."

"They, of course, weren't meant to be," he answered as he exited.

I laughed again, softer, and rang for the nurse. She raised my bed, but not quite high enough for me to see out my window comfortably. I lifted my body and a sudden wave of black discs floated at me. My head seemed airborne also, and the discs enlarged and drifted closer, then suddenly covered my eyes with a quick bright shock and I fainted.

Climbing up from the faint, more symbolically than physically, I quietly labored out of the sea of self-pity. My nose filled with the smell of fresh-cut grass, heavy and a bit too sweet, like watermelon, and the tart needles of pine, and the unmistakable mixture of make-up, sweat and perfume which meant woman. I focused on the blue, sweetly wrinkled eyes above mine.

"Hello, lovely," I said, and touched her cheek. She blushed, her face like a rose nestled among her pale short hair. Lt. Light had a large body, but her face was a small, timid oval above it. She was small breasted, but perfect in the legs and hips. I hadn't noticed before. She always hunched forward as if afraid her height might offend, and this small touch made her uniform seem less than the armor the other nurses wore.

"It seems you're all right," she said.

"I suppose the script calls for me to say, 'Well, you're pretty much all right yourself,' and you are, in spite of the script, all right."

"What do you want?"

"A cigarette?" I asked, and she gave me one and a light.

"Anything else?" she asked with the match cupped in her hand. "And if you say what the script calls for, I'll bust your head."

"It might be worth it."

"It might," she chuckled. She had sounded as if she really did want to know if I wanted anything else.

"You might stay and talk."

"I can't."

"Not right now?"

"Not anytime. You're an evil-minded enlisted man and I'm an officer and a gentleman," she said with a bit of a smile. But then back to business: "You sure you're all right?" She turned to leave as I nodded, and the hesitant way she carried her head struck me again. I wanted to straighten that back and lift that delicate face to the sun.

"One more thing," I said.

"Yes?" she asked very solemnly. She could change so quickly. Like all defenseless things, she was too ready to be hurt.

"Your name?"

She smiled again, and then did it perfectly, never thinking Lt. Light would be enough. "Abigail Light."

"Abby?"

"No."

"Gail?"

"No. Abigail," she said with a flip of her head, smiled again as if pleased by the sound of her name, then left. She had spoken her name in an old-fashioned way, musically important and not to be cheapened by a nickname, a name from a time when names mattered. Abigail Light. How much nicer than mine, I thought, mine which resembled an ominous rumble of thunder on a spring day. Jacob Slagsted Krummel. Slag Krummel.

I lay back in bed. My body, so lately and violently taught its vulnerability, forgot the pain, the violation. I stretched against the aches and pains of inactivity, scratched some of the smaller scabs on my right side, and decided I would live after all.

I examined my surroundings: my room; those sour walls; an uninviting porcelain-enamel framed bed, complete with an array of mechanical devices to push, pull, twist and turn, so that it might have been a place to get sick rather than well; two windows on the west wall, raised halfway and partly covered by age-yellowed roller shades, with panes of glass too clean to be less than sharp.

Out the windows is another story. In the distance sits the city of Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines, a multi-colored maze spread over half a dozen soft hills. Much nearer, lodged at the edge of a rise, is the Halfway House, a low and massive log building with an umbrella-spotted terrace slightly behind the ninth green. The tenth and eleventh fairways are across the road to the left, but I can't see them, nor the twelfth, and only the back edge of the thirteenth green because all this is hidden by the rise on which the fourteenth tee sits. The fourteenth fairway is straight with a slight down-slope for two hundred yards, then the plane of the land tilts left for the next one hundred yards just where a well-hit slice will run downhill into the evergreen rain-forest mixture of rough. Then the fairway is level for another thirty yards to where the raised green is banked against the side of the hill with two small traps at the fore-lip. (I once drove the right-hand trap with a good drive and lots of downhill run, but Morning thought I had paid my caddie to drop the ball there. He always was a hard man to convince.) There is a road about twenty yards above the green, and a graveled path on this side of the road leading directly toward my window. The path forks between the road and the hospital, one fork leading toward the hospital past my window, and the other toward the fifteenth tee off to the right. No one seems to walk toward my window, though.

My nostalgic lingering over the view was not without reason. There had been times when that small golf course had been our only refuge. We would come up when the heat and debaucheries of the plain had clogged our spirits, up to the mountains, to the sun and the afternoon rains. Cool air and solitude, fresh vegetables and virtue, golf and moderation, and the mountains stretching toward the sky. These things had brought peace to us then – but I wondered if they could pacify me now, now that I was alone with my memory, my history, now pinned with a wing I couldn't carry.

Less than three months before, Cagle, Novotny, Morning and I had stood on that very circle of green which so occupied me when I saw it again, stood healthy and laughing as the sun ate the morning mists. And as I thought of them, the sudden life in my veins became quick guilt, and all I had to do to see them again was close my eyes.

Black and white, black and white, stark black and white. A negative world undeveloped by dawn. A roar of all sounds lashed into one and no single cry can lift its pleading arm above the clamor. Novotny's healthy tan now blasted gray, his fatigues still starched, but he has a crazy black part through his stiff white hair. Cagle, small hairy body dancing in skivvy shorts, jerk, step, jerk, jerk, as blood spurts from his chest. And Joe Morning, Joe Morning, his strong length folding forward in a quick nervous bow as if someone important had just ended his life.

I opened my eyes and they were gone, and they were there, and there was not a thing I could do about it. I slept.

A nurse and a Filipino orderly woke me at ten for a bed-change and a whore's bath. They managed to do it without making me pass out from the pain. The clean sheets were stiff and cool against my back, and the bath had left me feeling clean for a change. I might be clean, but my right leg, after two weeks in a cast, smelled as if it had crawled in there to die. I asked for a barber and, oddly enough, one came from the hospital shop. He cleared away the stubble, trimmed my moustache and gave me a haircut.

Clean, shaven and rested, I refused to remember, and thought life would be wonderful if I could get a drink. In my nightstand drawer were several letters, one from my father with a fifty-dollar money order in it. I just glanced at the letter, catching a few lines here and there, something about his understanding that I wouldn't have any money in the hospital. It seemed that some rear-guard orderly in Cherbourg had stolen his money when he had come back from Bastogne with pneumonia in December of '44. Whatever his reason, Thank God, I thought, because I didn't have any money.

Lt. Light cashed it for me on her lunch hour, then I collared the orderly when he came back to pick up my lunch tray. He squirmed and complained a bit, then became so businesslike that I knew this was a regular business. I gave him enough scrip for a black-market fifth of Dewar's, and promised him another five when he brought it to my window that evening.

With nothing to do all afternoon except wait for that magic bottle, I read my mail. One was from my ex-wife, and opened with a small chapter on how nice it was that we were able to be friends even after our divorce – which wasn't quite true, but it sounded nice when she told her friends. Then she chatted about all the fine work she was involved in among the Negro population of Mississippi. She spoke of Mississippi as if it were Madagascar, but I knew that in spite of the fashionable nature of her "idealistic commitment" as she called it, she was really a good-hearted woman in the best sense of the word, and most of the time I was sorry that she had left me. She also managed to hope that I wouldn't get mixed up in that mess in Vietnam, and quoted the objections of a brilliant and dedicated young man she worked under. I wasn't quite so sorry after all. She had been writing me for almost two years now, telling me how she suffered for my bitterness and bias, but she wasn't about to give up, even if I never answered. In a drunk moment some months before, I had dropped her a postcard with one word on it, "Nigger-lover," but I had forgotten to address it. I often wondered who received it; it was a photo of a Negrito pygmy.

My father's letter was the usual thing: it had or hadn't rained, and the ranch was or wasn't doing well; one of my younger brothers had done something to make him wonder why a man bothered to continue the family name (this time Claude, the youngest, had tried to ride a Brahma bull in a rodeo, and had been hooked in the mouth before he got out of the chute, and the old man had to cough up two hundred bucks for a dental bill, and that reminded him, parenthetically, of my first and last, ha, attempt at the bulls, when that bastard bull, named Sara Lou for some obscene reason, had eaten my lunch at the Tilden rodeo, cracked half a dozen ribs, broke my left arm, and left me with a four inch half-moon memento on my left cheek, and goddamn hadn't that been funny); he wished I would get out of the Army because it was a shame to waste my education, but a man had to do what he wanted or never be happy, and the Army wasn't really so bad, or he didn't remember it being so. The last thing he mentioned (last so I wouldn't think I had caused him any grief or worry) was the telegram and letter about me being hurt. It took a while, but I finally understood that he thought I had been injured in an aircraft accident.

An aircraft accident, they were calling it. Well maybe it was. Surely the good old Army brass couldn't admit that a little bitty batch of Vietcong had dropped in on the 721st Communication Security Detachment and its three-hundred-thousand-dollars worth of equipment on our first night of operation; dropped in and knocked hell out of us. Not even the American Congress was supposed to know we were in Vietnam, so how could the VC know? I didn't know then how many casualties the 721st had taken, but I had seen enough to know that it had been bad. A plane crash. Shit.

And here I was, shot in the arm and leg by an American first lieutenant three hours after the attack was over. I hadn't been angry yet, partly because I had done a foolish thing, and partly because I had not thought about it. There were others dead, and I counted myself lucky to be alive, fortunate enough not to bitch about the conditions of being alive. But anger is easier than reflection, so I paced the afternoon remembering every stupid officer I had ever known, and learned to hate them all over again.

After evening chow Ramon and I handled our transaction at the window. I had a snort, then hid the bottle under my pillow, and tried to sleep until taps. I, fool that I was, wanted a peaceful drink without any nosy nurses bothering me.

It must have been three o'clock before I awoke. My leg hurt, my head ached, the scabs on my side itched and my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe. Like a wounded crab I managed to pour a large amount of tepid water on my nightstand and a small swallow in the glass which I drank without drowning. Now was the big moment, the drink I had been waiting for all day. Mellow Scotch to sooth an angry soul. It tasted like shit. Strange how that taste cuts through romantic notions.

I choked on the first swallow and spit half of it on my bedclothes. Three more fast sips, then I rested, waiting for a little numbness. I wondered why I objected to being drugged with drugs, but not with alcohol. Matter of middle-class taste, I supposed. Another sip, then a swallow, then a real man-sized drink. It didn't make any difference; I still gagged each time. I rested again.

A delicate chill had touched the air, and it seemed too heavy and damp for the mountains. Slight rustlings and tiny chirps like drowsy questions peeped through my window from the two pines. Past the trees a misty fog slept in the hollows, solid and white under the moon, gauzy and glistening beneath the street lamps. I searched the drifting mist, waiting for the Scotch to nudge me into that magic world outside my window, but I quickly began to feel silly: like a midnight rendezvous that doesn't come off, and by one o'clock you are tired, cold and wish to hell you had never come, and hate the day you met her. And as I thought of a woman, supposing one to be just what I needed, I wondered what a climax in traction might be like. In my shape? Why not? Anything Fredrick Henry can do, I can do better. But then she came, the one I had been waiting for. Pale and delightfully breathless, a virgin reborn in the cobweb tangle of moon in her hair, her mouth opening like a flower under mine… As if by magic I was drunk, the cold air bubbling in my nose, the hot kiss of Scotch in my belly.

For fifteen minutes I laid waste to those fifteen hundred famous virgins whoever they were. Within the next five minutes I banished evil from the house of man, smashing mine enemies with my virtuously white right claw. I shot a little more time trying to say "white right claw." I had had love, virtue and honor, so I tried wine again, and drank seriously for a while. But it all amounted to – within half an hour I was drunk and bored, securely immobilized, without a soul to talk to me, to see me, or even pity me. Just me, alone in the dark, with half a bottle left and too many hours until dawn. But even boredom lacked constancy. My mind ranged the wide world of all incoherencies. I was grief-stricken and appalled by my survival; then certain that it was only my due as the fittest. There was much guilt, then bountiful thanks, for the death of Joe Morning.

All things are possible on dark mornings, and by the time dawn revealed the troubled corners of my room, I hated, hated Lt. Dottlinger, who I had never liked anyway, and then the bastard shot me… well. I dug a pen from the nightstand drawer and signed my own cast, scrawled FUCK YOU exactly over the hole in my thigh. I wanted to write SLUTFINGER, as Dottlinger was known in the 721st, but was too tired.

Dawn is one thing, daylight another: I had several drinks during the difference. Sleepy groans announced the new day in the wards. All ambulatory patients were being awakened to make their beds and sweep and buff under them. If any managed a hundred-and-one degrees or a traction cast, they could sleep ten minutes longer. I thought this no way to treat sick men, so transferred hates from Dottlinger to the hospital. I was mad. (I say mad, in the literal sense, neither to excuse nor to account for the following adventure.)

Lt. Hewitt came in. Poor Lt. Hewitt carrying her lack of flesh. She was always bright and cheery, her uniform so starched and white it glittered like an angel's wing, her smile all teeth and well-brushed gums, as if to say, "Look at me! I don't care that I'm ugly and skinny. Oh, see how well I'm holding up! See!"

"Good morning, Sgt. Krummel," she sang as only she could. "And how are we this fine morning?" She held the thermometer out like a stick of candy. As I tried to answer her, she stabbed me under the tongue, and crowed, "There we are!"

"Where?" I mumbled.

"Now who's autograph is that?" she asked as she saw my sign. "Now, that's not very nice, Sgt. Krummel," she said, stiffening her back and propping her fist on what passed for her hip. "Just what is it?"

I spit the thermometer at her and answered, "A valentine?"

She was not amused.

"A proposal?" I offered. Her fist skied off her hip. Probably not angry before, she certainly was now, thinking I was making fun of her. "Sure," I hurriedly said, trying to make it all into a joke, "The closer to the meat, the sweeter is the bone. Leap in here and we'll make the beast with two backs." I didn't think her father would mind. I laughed. I should not have.

"You son of a bitch! You smart-ass son of a bitch!" she screamed, then punched me right in the nose. With her fist like a large, bony knuckle. My nose started bleeding and that, for some sanitary reason, made her even angrier. She hit me again. On the nose. She must have smelled the liquor because she stepped back and accused me, "You've been drinking. You're drunk, aren't you? Aren't you?" Her voice screeched like chalk on a blackboard and made my teeth ache.

"A man's gotta have a little fun in this shithole." The blood had dripped through my moustache into my mouth, so I spit on the other side of the bed. Bones hit me again. In the eye.

"Hey, will you cut that crap out?" I asked.

She hit me on the nose again. I debated hitting her (one of my ancestors, so it was told, had once hit a woman, but she had had a knife after him), so I decided not to. I spit a mouthful of blood on her pure skirt. It splattered the white cloth like dark sin, and I could not have hit her hard enough to make her jump back the way she did. A dirty trick, I admit, but better than hitting her. Also easier.

"You've ruined my uniform!" she shrieked. "You'll be sorry! You'll pay for that! And this too!"

I reached under my pillow and had a drink on that.

"Don't you throw that bottle at me! Don't you dare."

God knows I wouldn't have. No telling what she would have done to me.

"Get out of here, you silly bitch. Get out and let me die in peace."

"Don't you threaten me!"

"Ah, shit… Hawww!" I shouted, then threw the bottle in the opposite corner. She screeched and ran away like a wounded goat.

It was so quiet after she left that I could hear an occasional early golfer driving off the fifteenth tee and snatches of conversation and laughter from the fairways. The morning seemed fresh and bright, the air clean, and I wished I were playing golf out there instead of hell in bed. Then I was sorry I had thrown the bottle away because I wanted another drink. The one I'd had was working like magic in my stomach; better than coffee or food, it had awakened me.

Then Sgt. Larkin, the male nurse, rushed in, pushing a rattling tray of hypos. He was a short, stocky, hairy man who tried to give the impression he had seen everything. But he had not seen me.

"Okay, son," he said, "Take it easy. Everything's going to be all right." He advanced, needle held like a knife in his hand, and reached for my unbroken arm. "This'll make everything all right."

"Then you take it. Keep off, man." I jerked my arm away.

"Okay, buddy, let's stop with the games." He had a low level of patience. He tried to make his voice cold and military; but I didn't give a shit for that now.

"Butt out, Larkin. Get that damned needle away."

He reached again, and I slapped the needle out of his hand. The swinging of my arm released something in my blood, something hot and clean. It hardened into a calm, mean thing, clear and clean now, and I liked it.

"Okay, bud, we're through with the games now," he said, preparing another dose. "I don't want to break your other arm, but you're gonna get this one way or the other."

"Don't talk so much, tough man. Get on with it." I felt a smile like a dare on my face. Larkin hesitated, then shook his head as if wondering what there was to be afraid of. I caught him with a stiff thumb in the windpipe as he leaned over the bed. Not too hard. Not too easy either.

He staggered backwards, his hands pleading at this throat, his eyes praying to me, then crashed into his tray. It danced drunkenly away on two legs, bounced off the wall, then swayed, throwing its glittering mad burden across the floor, then rolled slowly back towards Larkin. He gurgled and moaned, tossing.

"Don't fuck with the Phantom," I said, and he heard me before he passed out. The spasm in his larynx relaxed, and his breathing started again. But I didn't pay too much attention. Christ was a carpenter; he could afford to forgive his enemies; I'm a warrior, and can't.

It was quiet again, and I rested, testing the air with my bleeding nose. I pitied Bones for a moment, wondering how I might apologize. But kindness never really repays cruelty, I thought, Let her hate me. That might be the kindest thing of all. But then I laughed as I wondered what poor soul might rattle Bones together some day. "What a mess," I whispered. "What a silly mess." I was sure that somehow this was all Morning's fault. Maybe the bastard was going to haunt me. I might have offered his ghost a drink of blood or Scotch, whatever its preference, but the Air Policeman Bones had called came in.

He was so tall and strong, his face nearly all jaw under the shadow of his cap. His mouth was compressed into a thin, unbent line, and he stood as if he might challenge the gods of war themselves; but he was a soldier, not a warrior. All show and slow to boot.

"All right," he said, sharply. "What seems to be the trouble here." He had glanced at Larkin and the scattering of glass with a look which said "inoperative" and dismissed them from his mind. "You there! What's going on here?" He addressed an imaginary point where my head would have been if I could have stood.

"Me? Geez, I don't know. I just work here."

"You, fellow."

"Say, sonny, ya'll tilt that there sombrero back jest a scrunch so's Ah cain sees ya'll's eyeballs. Ain't likely Ah'd talk with a man, ifn Ah cain't sees his eyeballs."

He snapped to attention. "Cut the lip, huh."

"You taking me in, airman?"

"No," he answered in all seriousness. "Just going to hold your arm while they stick a needle in it. I've handled you nut-house cases before."

"Oh, really. Well, let me show you something before you start handling this nut-house case," I said, holding up my left hand. "See that hand, sonny. That's a real mean hand. Registered with the police in seven states as a dangerous weapon. See those calluses on the side there, and on the fingertips. That's a killer's hand, son. You'd best watch it."

"Ha, ha. You been seeing too many movies, fellow."

"Perhaps, perhaps so, young man. That may well be the case. But the visualization of a dream certainly does not alter the essence of its reality; it enhances the reality."

"You really are crazy, aren't you? I guess you look sort of crazy."

Ah ha, I thought, a nonbeliever, a discounter of dreams. And a warrior must dream. "I'm warning you, watch that hand."

"You better stop going to those movies. You're liable to get hurt," he chuckled as the doctor entered, brisk, impatient, another blessing in hand.

"Away! foul son of Priam or be split asunder," I shouted, waving my arm. "And the smoke of your pyre will trample the night like the hot, raging breaths of a stallion and the flames lick the sky like the hounds at his flanks."

"Jesus," the doctor said.

The AP laughed and stepped to the side of the bed. "Okay, sir, I'll handle this crazy bastard," he said, smiling just enough to bend the line of his mouth. I sneered, bunched my arm on my chest. He reached for it, then hesitated and shook his head like Larkin, then reached again.

But it wasn't there. It had sped like a spear into that soft spot below the sternum, in, in to the knot of nerves, and quivered there. His eyes opened in the shadow of his visor. I had only intended a poke, a tap to let him know that I could, but my arm raised a soul of its own and spoke to something in mine. Again, swifter than thought, strengthened with a short grunt of nervous energy, my hand rejoined the battle. The AP's mouth opened, though not in laughter, and the upper half of his body tilted over the bed. I raised the cast-bound arm, serious now, and swung, remembering a Paiute ghost dancer granted invulnerability by Wovoka, a Bulgarian under Krum seeking a Byzantine skull for his drinking cup, remembering every violent image dredged from the limitless memory of man, and the ghosts lent me strength. I took him on the side of the head above the ear. His cap flew away; his head and shoulder crammed against the wall, shattering plaster. He shivered in a spasmodic dance, then his eyeballs, visible now, rolled, and he joined Larkin on the floor. I, purged, lay back to ease my ragged breath. Then the pain came from my leg, twisted and sucked my soul back into the void, and I went thankfully away.

There was a bird, a woodpecker, standing on my head, pecking my nose. I clenched my eyes and rolled my head, but he kept up that incessant pecking. Each one came as a bright flash, tapping me out of the peaceful darkness. Goddamned bird. He wouldn't get off my nose. He pecked exactly where it had been broken once, right in the tenderest spot. I strained to get my hands on him, but they would not move. Then a phrase from a bad Tennyson sonnet jumped into my head, something about a "still-recurring gnat." But it wasn't a gnat, it was a vulture… Then I woke.

Another Air Policeman, same size, etc., leaned over me, hitting the bridge of my nose at perfectly regular intervals with his billy, very light blows, only slightly heavier than a raindrop. He was good. No matter which way I turned my head, his baton was waiting there to keep up the beat. Tap! Tip! – ha, you Tap! missed Tap! that one. Tap! But only that one. Jesus, I thought, this is getting damn repetitious. I pictured an unending line of APs waiting outside the room. Surely twelve trials would be enough, I laughed to myself, But will this ever stop? Does a wave ask the circle of the sea for the shore? I laughed. Straps held my arms and I moaned. But the beat still went on. With a chant now, to my open eyes, "Tough guy. Tough guy. Tough guy." I snarled at him, a growl, a lion harassed by the beaters: "Yaaaawwwwllll!"

The cadence stopped blinding my eyes, and I saw that he had stepped back. He was older, tougher than the other one, and informed me in a quiet voice how happy he would be when I recovered from my injuries, probably self-inflicted, and I could come visit his friends and he in their stockade. I snarled again, snapped like a hungry hound. He leaned solicitously over me, smiled clean teeth, and pleasantly intoned, "Tough guy." His baton captured my attention as he rapped me gently in the crotch, almost tenderly. Then a bit harder, and the ripe, spreading pain and nausea began to flow, in, then out, leaving a great hollowness in my guts. "One more time," he murmured.

Doctor Gallard came later, came with his portable X-ray and his concern.

"How's the leg?" he asked as the technicians laid sheets of lead covering on my chest. He asked only about the leg. "I came as soon as I heard… about the incident. You didn't hurt that leg, did you? Surely hate to go back in there."

"I don't know."

"Why is your nose bleeding?"

"Lt. Hewitt popped me one this morning when I made what she called advances toward her."

"It shouldn't still be bleeding."

"I sneezed."

Gallard glanced at the AP, then back at me as if to say I probably deserved worse than I had received. "Go ask the nurse for some ice and a cloth, corporal."

"I'm supposed to guard him, sir," he said, nodding at me. Like all warders, caged men frightened him more than free ones.

"I think I can prevent him from biting me, corporal. Go on."

"I don't know, sir. He's a mean one, he is." He chuckled.

"Don't mock your betters," I said to him, "lest they notice you."

"You guys never learn, do you?" He stepped toward the bed.

"The ice, corporal."

"Yes, sir."

Gallard did not speak while the AP was gone, and made him wait outside when he came back. "You feel it's your right to rape and pillage?" he asked, cradling the back of my neck with the ice.

"Achilles called rear-guard soldiers wine sacks with dogs' eyes and deers' hearts."

"So what? You haven't seen enough war to even know what it's about, and yet here you are raising more hell than a regiment of Marines."

"I knew, now I know. Besides, small things lead to bigger ones without anyone's help. Acorns and oaks and all that crap. I wanted a drink. This came of only that. Takes two to make war. Things grow in this crazy world."

"Of course," he said, digging his hands into his hair as if searching for something very small and incredibly important. "So?"

"Not an excuse. Just what happened, that's all. It was my fault, but I'm not going to say I'm sorry, or say I won't do it again. I want to be left alone, and I will manage to be left alone."

"Victim of an undeclared war, huh? Fighter for right and humanity? Killer of small, hungry men."

"I was raised for a warrior. What else would you have me do?"

"That's your problem, not mine."

But you want it to be, I thought, And it will.

He finished with his business and went away.

I sang softly into the afternoon, sang to the green grass and sky, to the bright, burning haze of the sun, "Joe Morning, Joe Morning, where have we come?"