One to Count Cadence

3. Town

By the time I ate and walked up to my room, the Trick had already changed out of their uniforms and gathered in my room.

"What's the hurry? I'm going to shower first," I drawled.

"Shower!" they screamed. "What are you? a preacher? You don't shower before you go to Town!"

Outvoiced, I reached in the closet for a pair of slacks.

"What are you? Got a date or something? You don't wear slacks to Town." They were dressed in Town clothes, that is, everything from shoes to shorts which could be ripped, stolen, or shit on for all they cared. I tried a pair of Levi's.

"What are you, a new guy? No Levi's, no blue jeans off base!"

I took another pair, light brown, a knit shirt and a pair of buff Wellingtons, and sat them on the table. "Okay, troops, out," I said, opening the door. "You just wait in the Orderly Room, I'll be right down. As soon as I shit, shower, and shave."

They grumbled, but they left, and were waiting in the Day Room, playing pool and shuffleboard when I came down.

"So you're lovely, Sarge," Cagle said, "but Town is all used up by now." It was 0745.

"I hear you're going to Town," Tetrick said from behind his desk. He handed me the sheaf of three-day passes. "Make 'em sign out." His face was pale and bloated from a hangover, but he smiled. "They'll take care of you until you can take care of them. I hope. But watch yourselves. Capt. Saunders is going stateside for six weeks, and Lt. Dottlinger will have the Company. He don't like guys who go to Town. So stay clean.

"You guys don't let him fall in love," Tetrick shouted as we left.

Lt. Dottlinger was coming in, his OD armband still crinkling his shirt sleeve, as we tumbled out front to wait for the cabs to take us to the gate. He answered our quick salutes with a crisp touch of ball-point pen to cap bill and a grim, brimstone eye.

Angeles, in spite of its reputation as a minor version of heaven, was a collection of bamboo huts, wooden, tin-roofed buildings, dusty streets, open sewers, and seventy-five or eighty bars. It wasn't quite as modern as a Mexican border town, which it very much resembled, nor as dirty as a large city slum. The streets always seemed festive in a way, filled with people, dogs and pigs wandering without the help of crosswalks or traffic lights. I liked the look of the people. They were cleaner than I had been led to expect, and without that wolfish, greedy glare of the citizens of Columbus, Georgia or Fayetteville, North Carolina or Kileen, Texas.

Our cabs stopped in the center of Town where five streets intersected. Three kiosks were around the plaza, three of the half-dozen or so enclosed ones. The others, and there seemed to be hundreds spotted around Town, were open to the weather. It was explained to me that kiosks were for serious drinking, since the barmaids were indecently nice and wouldn't even meet an American eye on the street. The whores were in the bars or in houses. Trick Two, my Trick, usually gathered at the Plaza.

We filed into the narrow, high room, jammed ourselves around an elongated horseshoe bar on small, hard bamboo stools. Venetian blinds held off the early morning sun around one long and one short side, and three Edwardian fans ladled the air above the bar, buzzing and stirring as much breeze as fat, lazy blowflies. A huge hulk of chrome and plastic commanded the scene from a niche high in the end wall, contentedly bubbling, watching over her foolish children.

"Roll Call, mama-san," Morning said to the large, middle-aged owner of the Plaza.

"Aaiiieeee," she giggled, taking her glasses off. "Take business to Chew Chi's." She sat her glasses back on her face as if they might protect her as Trick Two sat down.

"Too early," said a heart-faced girl behind the bar. Her smile exposed a front tooth circled in gold-fill which formed a small, white heart on her tooth. She and two other girls gave everyone a cold, thick San Miguel and a utilitarian tumbler of such thickness it might be used for anything from weapon to anchor – and it was. Beers were neatly poured, then Morning pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, and began:

"In so much as this is a world we didn't make, filled with dangers we refuse to understand, we of Trick Two do hereby withdraw ourselves from the arms race, the space race, and the human race for these next three days; and being the finest of fellows, comrades and carousers, humbly raise our glasses in defiance and bow our heads in shame, and here do solemnly swear (or affirm) to drink until the moon falls from the heavens, the heavens on our heads, or we, fat chance, on our asses.

"Agreed?"

"Aye!"

"I shall read the roll of the honored and infamous alike."

"Thomas Earl Novotny," Morning intoned.

"Aye," growled Novotny, then stood and poured the beer down his throat.

(Novotny, the cowboy, hated the Army so bad that when he made Specialist Fifth Class he would change out of uniform rather than eat in the NCO mess area. But he was a good soldier. Perhaps he just didn't like people telling him what to do.)

"John Christopher Cagle." He choked halfway down, but finished his glass.

(Cagle, the monkey, the dancer, the nervous mover. His father was a chaplain, a major in the Air Force who believed, according to Cagle, God to be a combination between General Eisenhower and General Motors. "That Great Used Car Salesman in the sky," Cagle used to sing. He had been expelled from Indiana University his senior year for trying to break into the Kinsey Institute of Sexual Research's pornographic collection, and had been in trouble ever since. The Company had long since given him up so long as he hurt no one but himself and his eyebrows. His greatest triumph came when he returned from thirty days' leave in Japan. He stepped off the plane wearing a Japanese private's uniform, carrying a samurai sword and sporting a goatee. But he never told anyone how he got on that plane.)

"Doyle Quinn."

"Ha!" Quinn shouted, "Now the serious drinkin' begins!" and tossed down his beer.

(Quinn. His steady shack, Dottie the bowlegged whore, cared for him and hid his shoes so he would be faithful, but nothing worked, so she tried suicide from the second floor of a nipa hut and became Dottie the bowlegged whore. But none of this made the slightest impression on Quinn. He was a sly, dark Irishman from the City, tough and wild, never caring if the sun came up. A false tooth set in his jaw had been broken in a fight, leaving only the gray, metallic core, and Quinn didn't bother to have it fixed. Born to streets and alleys, poverty and race riots, his laughter had acquired a stony, mocking edge to it which said, "I've seen the whole mess and I don't give a shit for it, so let's have another.")

"David Douglas Franklin."

"Ha!" he snorted and snarled like his idol, Quinn.

(His parents thought they had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital, and in shame never had another. Mr. Franklin was a typewriter repairman and his wife cashiered in a restaurant in Bristol, Connecticut, and their son had an IQ upwards of immeasurability. They prevented him from reading until he was four by slapping the Reader's Digest out of his hands. They thought he wanted to tear out the pages. They hid him in a back room when friends came to play bridge because he always won. Once they discovered that he wasn't a freak, Franklin went on display throughout the neighborhood. He finished eight years of school in two, then missed four years because he wouldn't go, then two more because he failed when they made him attend school, but managed to finish with his original class which was all he wanted, anyway. His father's finest moment came as he decked the school psychologist for suggesting that the child might have family troubles. I once heard Franklin say, "I rather be dumb than have acne.")

Morning called the rest of the names, and they drank. Samuel Lloyd Levenson, the Jewish weasel, red-headed, freckle-faced, giggler, always naked in the barracks, but he would make it. William Frank Collins, he was called Mary, crewcut, pug-nosed American boy, mild segregationist, biology teacher, husband and father from Florida. Carl Milton Peterson, our kid, known as the Gray Ghoul for his thin, shallow face and mild manners, son of a Bemidji, Minnesota service station owner. Richard Dale Haddad, looked Jewish, had an Arabic name, but claimed to be Spanish, he was an operator, a big man in the blackmarket, balding at twenty-three like any other good young executive. Then Morning called my name, then his, and after he drank, he passed the list to me, and I called the names and we drank, and we all called the names until they answered no more.

At high noon: Cagle, Morning, Novotny, Quinn, a one-legged guitar player and pimp named Dominic who claimed to be a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a Filipino homosexual hairdresser called Toni dressed in full drag, and me, who claimed by this time to be the last survivor of an Apache attack on Fort Dodge, Iowa. The other guys had platoons of empty bottles doing drill before them, while I couldn't even keep my scraggly squad in a good line of skirmishers. I thought those other bastards had been stealing my bottles just to emasculate me, but I couldn't catch them. The faster I drank, the further behind I got, and while my nose was nearly in my bottle, the others were too sober to trust. I suppose I did well, considering I took on the Trick's hard-core Townies. San Miguel ran about fifteen percent alcohol, and took getting used to.

At least I wasn't the only drunk. Peterson had simply dived out of his stool at 1015. Novotny took his money, and carried him out to a calesa. Outside he found Collins throwing up in the street, so he sent them off to the Trick's apartment to sleep. Levenson had roared away to the Factory for a quick three-peso piece, with Franklin right behind him. Haddad had gotten angry at Mama-san because she wouldn't let him do another flamenco on the bar like he did last Roll Call, so he left too, stamping and clapping and shouting Olé.

Finally the rest of us counted up our bottles, paid and said goodbye to Morning's two Filipino friends. As I stepped into the sunlight, the heat, the brilliance, knocked me silly. It was the light of the day that would never be night. Nothing, not the hand of God, nor the mere spinning of the earth, could put out that fire in the sky. We wandered down the street, the middle of the street, dodging our way through the sea of dusty gold.

"Sgt. Slag," Quinn said, "you look a little bit drunk."

"Nonsense, knave. It's these chuckholes in the highroad which cause me to use this particular peculiar gait. Chuckholes, my fellow. Indeed."

He laughed wildly, almost braying, his tooth flashing like a spark, and slapped me on the back.

"Avast there mate."

He laughed again. "You're okay for a fuckin' college guy. You might make it."

"And you also, kind squire, are a fine bit of a gentleman, a yeoman tiller of the soiled and a reveler."

We turned a corner somewhere. I could see the world. A wrinkled old woman, her graying hair wrapped into a bun, tended two baskets by the edge of the sidewalk. She squatted motionless, sucking on a black cigarette, the fire in her mouth, taking smoke with each breath of air. One basket held baluts, the nearly-hatched duck eggs which Filipinos considered delicious, and the other, small ears of corn toasted on coals.

"Haven't we met somewhere before, young lady. Perhaps Newport. Or was it Saratoga?" I was saying as Novotny came back to get me.

"Not her, man. She's worn out." The old woman hadn't moved. Smoke wisped around her small leathery nose each time she breathed.

"Ah, but she's beautiful. Don't you see? There's character in that face, those delicate wrinkles cut by the sharp knife of time. The dignity of age… 'It little profits that an idle king,/By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/Met with an aged wife…'"

"You buy balut," she asked suddenly, the con shining in her eyes as she looked up.

"Yes, mother, those who hustle, live. Yes." I paid twice the price, and walked away with Novotny, the egg warm and firm in my hand, begging to be thrown.

"You drunk?" he asked.

"I?"

"What are you going to do with that? Not going to eat it, huh?" he asked as I pitched the egg in the air.

"I had to lose my cherry sometime," I answered, tossing it higher and higher. It broke in my hand and a warm, stringy fluid dripped between my fingers. I squeezed it and the juice spat on the street and rolled up a fine film of dust. In my hand the shell pieces revealed the yellow, matted feathers of the stillborn duckling. I picked the shell away. The body lay in my hand like the victim of a shipwreck. I dropped the mess in the gutter and wiped my hand on my pants.

"What's all that about?" Novotny asked.

"Huh? Oh, it was a symbolic expression of the nihilism inherent in all human searches for pleasure, coupled with the paradox that pleasure is the basis of conservatism, the enemy of nihilism."

"Bullshit."

"Exactly."

He and I caught up with the others at the Keyhole, a quiet, dark bar with a few cushioned lounge chairs. I sat down in one, drank two more mouthfuls of beer, then passed out.

I awoke on my face. A button on a lumpy, raw-cotton mattress bit into my cheek. As I rolled over, I saw myself in a large mirror which hung at an angle over the narrow bed. Also reflected was a small naked girl sitting backwards on a chair next to the bed.

"Hey," she said, smiling, "you wake up now, huh? Good. Time to go soon. Good you wake up now."

"Who're you?" My head hurt and I was still whoozy.

"TDY."

"Huh?"

"TDY. Temporary Duty. Tanduay Rum. TDY. Best puck in all Town. You look in billfold."

I did, expecting all my money to be gone. All but ten pesos of it was and there was a folded note. "Dear Fucking Newguy: Sleeping in the streets, bars, or latrines of Town is expressly forbidden by CABR 117-32. There was a party at the apartment, so you couldn't sleep there. I took your money. The room is paid for. The Alka-Seltzer is for your stomach and head – TDY for your soul. When you're ready she'll show you the way to the apartment. Good Morning."

I looked up. TDY was standing next to the bed, holding the foil package like a gift in front of her hairless crotch. Her smile had a what-the-hell reflection in her eyes, and her body was young and slim; but she wasn't attractive, or even pretty or cute. I wondered if Morning was playing a joke. Me, sleep with that obviously disease-infested child. Why her feet were even dirty. And she had no clothing that I could see except for a soiled, limp blue dress hanging on the doorknob like a dishcloth. No shoes either.

"You like TDY, yes?"

"Yes, but I like Alka-Seltzer too." I climbed off the bed, took the packet from her, and went to the sink. The room was small, square and furnished with a bed, chair, sink and the mirror. A single unscreened but shuttered window exposed a length of cracked, vine-crawling wall. The room was stripped for action. I took the seltzer, washed my face and walked back to the bed to put my boots on.

"We puck now," she said, laying her small hand against my shirt. "Joe Morning say TDY no have heart of gold, but silver pussy." Her hand slipped under the knit shirt and lay flat against my stomach. It seemed so tiny, so painfully childlike. I was ready to react if she tried to grab my crotch as if it were a moneybag, but she did not stir. Just that tiny hand warm against my belly. "We puck now?" It was not a question of time she was inquiring about, but of her and me and the universe. She undressed me, then with a giggle pushed me on the bed, turned me over when I bounced, and jumped astride my back. She lay there for several minutes, quivering, rubbing her belly on my butt, kneading the muscles of my neck and shoulders, and whispering small kisses across my back. She stayed that way until a sweat broke between us. Each time I tried to turn over, she bit me, not playfully but hard, then continued. Then she turned me over, lay on my chest with her back, and began all over again. She placed my hands on her little breasts and held them and rubbed them and shivered against them. She caught my cock between her legs and held it. The sweat broke sooner this time, and when it did, she slid and moaned and moved and held me tighter between her legs. Her body was so small against mine, and in the mirror, it seemed most deliciously black on the white space of me. My hands looked like water-whitened jellyfish stinging at her breasts.

Then she flipped over and threw herself against me, her body skittering across mine, and clamped her mouth to mine, splitting my teeth with her tongue, her tiny hands clutching our faces together. I could feel the expectant hunch of her on my stomach, but she was too short to breach the gap. She sprayed kisses over my face, in my ears, warm and flickering like the summer rain. But her head crept slowly down my chest as her rocking crotch searched, found and took me as if I were the gift, and cradled me preciously. She sat up and back, her hands on my chest, and gave as much as she took.

The motion was slow and easy for a time, graceful in her control, then faster. She closed her eyes, then bared her teeth, then faster, her hands sliding against my chest. And faster still, her toes dug into the mattress, riding in quick little punches. She grabbed my neck, pulled my face to her, to the small hot slaps of her breasts. My body bent in a circle, a hard, fleshy ring around her, and she the tiny missing link completing the arc – and she pumped like a runner's heart. I understood about the silver, the quick sliding silver, and that single hoping arm reached and all my blood fled to my feet in the wake of her motion, then exploded up the aching chimneys of my legs.

I lay empty, only now aware of her greedy contracting spasms, wondering if she had really had a climax. (In the months to come I understood that she always did, and always would. She liked to fuck. She wasn't obsessed with it, or manic about it, she just liked it. She was obsessed with movies. She always cried afterwards, thinking GIs expected it. I never heard one complain, though, now that I think about it. Maybe she knew more than we thought.)

I woke when she climbed off the bed. Her eyes were puffy, but she smiled like a child on her birthday.

"I ride on top," she said, " 'Cause… cause you too… big." She meant heavy. "And so you can watch in mirror."

My back ached, I was nearly raw and my head still hurt, but it had been a long time since I felt quite so good. I had forgotten how nice love without complications can be.

"I forgot to look," I said from the bed, watching her prop one foot on the wall and pee in the sink. I had to laugh.

"You should look," she said when she finished. "Room is fifty centavos more for mirror." She turned around. "How come you laugh?"

"Because you're beautiful."

"You put me on."

"No. Never."

"TDY not pretty."

"No. But you're beautiful."

"What you mean?"

"Beautiful like God, like an angel."

"Shame," she said, but she smiled.

"And I promise to look in the mirror next time." She laughed.

As I dressed an afternoon thunder shower flashed heavy rain in the sun. I opened the shutters, and smoked, waiting. The rain eased into large, splattering drops against the bright washed green of the vine, then ended with a roll of thunder like applause after a fine performance, and TDY and I left.

The world sparkled, spotless in the slanted rays of the sun. Water splashed like laughter from the glimmering puddles in the bronze street as calesa ponies sauntered past, and beggar boys marveled at the tickling ooze of mud between their toes as shy-eyed gum-and-flower girls disapproved from shaded doorways. They were happy, so easily impressed by a passing storm. Even TDY giggled and danced around me, splattering my unconcerned pants.

"What took you so long, man," Morning asked as TDY and I met Novotny, Quinn, Cagle and him on our way to the apartment.

"He sleep long time," TDY answered for me.

"Not too long, I bet, with that little Indian around," Novotny said, laughing. Quinn reared his head, rolled his eyes and spit wild snorts of laughter after the racing black clouds. Cagle grinned sleepily, then shut his eyes and leaned against the wall.

"Yeah," I said. "And thanks, too. I think I'll pass out again…"

"That's for sure," Quinn interrupted.

"… so I can wake up all over."

"She's something else," Morning said, rubbing his hand down her back and across the pout of her butt. "Pure silver under there. Pure." TDY laughed and arched against his hand, purred and tilted back her head. Morning asked if she wanted a beer.

"I go home, Joe. Clean up house," she said. "See you Mr. Moustache," she said, switching her butt against my leg. She pulled one end of it. "You tickle pussy sometime, huh?" She giggled and skipped down the street.

"Okay, where's home for that sweet little girl?" I asked. "Just in case you guys aren't around when I ah, pass out."

"She keeps the apartment for us," Morning explained. "We bought her."

"Like a vacuum cleaner?"

"No, man, like a maid." Morning said that TDY had been a calesa-girl, the lowest class whore, and Haddad had fucked her one night, realized what a gold mine she was, and convinced the Trick to buy her from the pimp she belonged to. Haddad provided the financing for half of his usual ten percent, persuaded TDY, then installed her a maid-of-all-tricks in the apartment which the Trick already rented in Town. The Trick kept her in food, clothes and money. She in turn kept the place clean and was available to any member without clap, when she wasn't at the movies. No one ever made her miss a movie. Cagle had tried once, and she cut him off for a month.

"Works out fine," Morning said. "You want in? Gives you a place to sleep, shower and shave on break. It's not fancy – six beds, a couch, a shower and a little bitty kitchen which is TDY's."

"How much?"

"Ten bucks a month to Haddad. He handles the arrangements and accounts, credits three-to-one, pesos to dollars, on your money, keeps the place up, pays the bills and gives the excess to the orphanage to outfit our basketball team and buy books."

"Come on," I scoffed.

"He's in love with one of the teachers, but she won't have anything to do with him because he's in the market. She thinks he's a threat to the economy, an arrogant Jew American Ugly. But she lets him coach the basketball team, and buys the books with the money he gives her…"

"But that's by God all he gives her," Quinn shouted, then reared and roared again, his tooth flashing like the flint of cynicism in his laugh.

"We're a bunch of fucking philanthropists," Novotny said.

"A bunch of fucking nuts," I said, slapping Morning on the shoulder. "Move over and let another one in, mother."

"There's five guys from Trick Four who use the place," Morning added. "But they break when we're working, so we don't get in each other's way." He paused expectantly.

"So?"

"One of them is a Negro…"

"So?"

"I just thought, if you minded, I should let you know."

"No sweat, Morning," I said.

"Just wanted to avoid trouble."

"You? Come on. You make trouble in gallon jugs, Morning."

"Sells well, anyway, man. Let's go have a drink."

"Take two – they're small."

"Goddamn, yours are," Quinn said, grinning slyly. "You a two or three beer man?"

As we walked away, laughing, Cagle remained leaning against the wall. He hadn't moved during the whole time. Morning went back to wake him up.

"Little fart can crap out anyplace," Novotny said.

Just as Morning reached for his shoulder, Cagle jumped at him, screaming and brandishing a knotted cane like a saber. Morning leapt backwards, arms and legs spread like a spider's, shouted "Sonofabitch!", then hopped forward as if out of physical control. Cagle parried Morning's arms, slid into him like a fencer and stabbed him in the heart.

"Touché!" he smirked. "What sort of spy are you, Agent Monday Morning. Taken in by the sleeping-dog lie. Ha! I'm sending you back to the Sally League."

Morning was limp. "Someday I'm going to kill you, Cagle." He wasn't angry; but he had been scared. In spite of the calm and composure with which he carried himself, Morning was intensely nervous. He was forever on edge, but it never showed except when something like Cagle's attack caught him with his face down.

But never the same thing twice, Novotny explained as we caught a jeepny to go for a steak at the Esquire. Cagle had been scaring hell out of Morning since Basic, when he had crawled into Morning's tent one night on bivouac. Morning had torn up the tent pegs and run ten yards in his sleeping bag before Cagle calmed him down. Another time, after they had gotten to the Philippines, Cagle had hidden under Morning's bunk, waited until he was asleep, then reached up and grabbed his throat. Morning had gasped and stiffened, then didn't move for several minutes. Worried, Cagle crawled out, turned on the light and found Morning wide-eyed and white, his breathing so deep it shook the bunk, and his pulse so furious, his hands fluttered on his chest. Cagle had to pour cold water on him to bring him around.

I wondered what Morning had thought during that time, then realized that he had thought nothing. He had been turned off as completely as if he were dead. I reminded myself to ask him about it someday. He sat in the front seat of the jeepny, alone with the driver, apparently relaxed, smoking and watching the road as we hurried out of Town. Nipa huts flashed into walls, and Morning's smoke whipped around my head. He seemed to have regained his calm by the time we reached the Esquire, halfway between Base and Town, and laughed about it over a bleeding steak and a beer.

Later that night, drunk again, Novotny and I were laughing and stumbling our way down a street unfamiliar to me on our way to the apartment, which I still hadn't seen. It was nearly midnight, and people were moving: some home after work, airmen back to the Base or into hiding until 0600 the next morning, and those Filipinos who seemingly wandered the streets at all hours. I was trying to tell Novotny something, I don't remember what, when I looked around and he was gone. His face, his brilliant teeth masked in a leathery grin, had been assimilated into the random movement of the ill-lit night. In turning to search for him, I forgot which way we had been walking. I could see in the alcoholic fog around my head, but I couldn't remember what I had seen. I pushed through the crowds along the side of the street, forced there by the increased traffic of jeepnys and cabs heading for Base, but I didn't see anything I recognized, then realized that I didn't know where the fabled apartment was anyway. As I decided to return to Base, and turned to hail a jeepny, they were all gone. Zip. The rocking street was empty except for a few stragglers hurrying underground and listless whores stretching their backs after another night's labor. An old woman's cardboard hand fluttered against my arm and her hesitant, fluting voice said something. I thought her begging, and shook my head. She was insistent with those stiff fingers on my elbow, and I understood she was selling. Not me, old hag of a woman, I thought, Not rich, creamy all-American me. But I let myself be led into an alley, saying to myself that it would be at least a safe place to sleep as she guided me over obstacled darkness, over rough ground threatening to rise at me with each step, into a small black cauldron of a room.

(But no sleep is safe: it all echoes death.)

I let her unresisting flesh ply its trade under me, added my load to those long never-remembered other ones which filled her crinkly skin. As I labored, I dimly heard rats gnawing at the rafters, the sound of their teeth on the wood and their squeaking voices a calliope above us. I asked why? and answered with abstractions like "responsibility to contracts made in good faith" and "be polite to old ladies and children" and the other rules by which I thought I lived. But I must have already known how the rules were failing me, the ordered forms gone in the rip that began with the rupture of my marriage and proposed career (how silly that word sounds now). Or perhaps with the rupture of my mother's maidenhead. Or, God knows, before. I hadn't learned about poetry and war yet. I still believed in salvation – and here I was seeking order and saving grace as my castle tumbled into the rising seas, searching with that funny finger in that aged dike below, that rebel finger which below me lived, aye, and even enjoyed. I mated with dark flesh that night, and she bore me dreams, magic, and hope, storm-festered dreams, magical revenge, and hope, and I never kissed her wrinkled face again and again.

Cagle was drunk. He walked straight down the sidewalk, but he half-faced the street, drifting like a Piper Cub in a high wind. Morning was in a foul mood, sulking about the fourteen ladies' drinks he had lost to Bubbles at the Hub. Three days in Town had flayed the skin from my body, and I was already making those familiar resolutions never to come back. We were walking up to the main street, looking for a jeepny to take us back to Base. As we passed the door of a foul den known as Mutt & Jeff's, three airmen burst out the door. The first and largest one was talking to the two behind him, and humped into Cagle. Cagle rebounded two steps, then went forward again before the airman could move. He elbowed Cagle out of the way, and snorted something about "Lookin' where the hell you're walkin' " and started back down the street in the direction from which we had come.

Morning, without a word, ran back to them, grabbed the airman's shoulders, spun him around and shoved him against his two buddies.

"You want to push somebody, mother-fucker, you push me," Morning said, anger quivering like a wind-tossed flame in his voice. "Don't push, man."

The airman had been openly attacked, was slightly larger than Morning, and probably felt himself in the right. He and his two pals charged just as I ran back to make peace. I tried to say something about not needing to fight to the other two guys, but one was already throwing a roundhouse right at me. I covered up, ducked and pushed the first one back into the second. When he rushed again, I stepped back and kicked him in the chest. He staggered backwards into the street and sat down in a puddle to get his breath. I asked the other guy if he wanted any of me, and he agreed that he didn't.

"Let's break this up before the APs arrive." He agreed again.

Morning, for all his anger, was boxing. He had the guy against the wall, stepping in and out, ringing the airman's ears with combinations of body punches and open-handed slaps. Morning's body was turned, his chin tucked and his right protecting his face in a nearly classic stance. The slaps smacked loud and arrogant. Morning played with the guy, nearly letting him out, then driving him against the wall with the blinding, deafening slaps, but without hurting him badly enough so he could quit with some semblance of honor.

I stepped between them, peeled them apart, and held them off. Morning's chest was trembling so fast under my hand that I wondered if he was going to hit me. But the other guy did. It was only a blind slap from a dazed and confused kid trying to beat off a nest of hornets, but it glanced off my tender twice-broken nose. I shoved him against the wall, set him up with a poking jab to the head, layed two right hooks under his heart, then dropped him with a forearm slam to the face when he bounced off the wall. He slid to a squat at the base of the wall, head in hands. I whirled back – Morning was grinning. The airman who hadn't gotten in the fray was looking after his buddy in the street who was walking and breathing again.

"Boy, you really broke up the fight," he sneered at me. "A real fucking peace-maker."

"I'm sorry…" I started to say, but realized he neither understood nor cared to understand, and besides was right, I suppose. He had to say something to cover his guilt for not helping his friends.

"I'll… I'll remember your ugly fucking face," the other one shouted as Morning and I walked to where Cagle leaned patiently against the wall. "We'll catch your ass some night, son of a bitch. In a dark alley, by your-god-damned-self!" I walked back to them, thinking, What a long eighteen months it was going to be.

"Let's stay straight, buddy. You swung at me before I could say hello. You just made a mistake. You should have stayed out of it like your pal here. So shut your mouth before you make two mistakes in one night. Next time I see you all, I'll buy the beer. And tell the other guy to watch where the hell he's walking. Okay? Okay."

"Okay," they said in chorus.

I caught up with Morning and Cagle. Morning was chuckling quietly.

"You guys through yet," Cagle muttered.

"Set them straight?" Morning asked, grinning as we hailed a jeepny. He was loose now.

"Maybe they won't cut us off at the pass."

"Piss on 'em."

"You're pretty good for a passive resister, Morning."

"That's why I'm here. I took crap from rednecks as long as I could, then one spit in my face one hungover morning at a lunch counter in Birmingham. I dropped his peckerwood ass." He took a plate of four teeth out of the left side of his mouth and showed it to me. "But his gentlemen buddies got me. Damnit, I forgot to take this damned thing out," he mumbled, putting it back in. "Someday I'm going to take a shot in the gut and choke on my plastic teeth." He laughed. "How'd you like to try to swallow that monster of Quinn's?"

We were on the highway now and the quiet whiz of the tires, the cool wind and the receding lights of Town made the fight seem far away. As we swept past the Cloud 9, a wild burst of laughter shot out to meet us, mocking my thoughts.

"You're pretty salty yourself," he said.

"I'm out of practice, Morning, and intend to stay that way. The next time you tee-off on a guy just because you're pissed at a broad, count me out."

"Bullshit," he said, smiling again, stretching his arms and popping his knuckles. "So I was pissed off. What's your excuse?"

"With you on the Trick, my stripes aren't worth a rusty razor blade."

"Not me, man. I don't rock the boat." He flipped his cigarette away and it flashed past me in a streaking red line, then sparkled the road like the fuse of a firecracker. He rubbed his hands greedily together, savoring the heat of violence. As I noticed him, I caught my own hand cradling my right fist, remembering the solid clunk it had made against the airman's ribs. My wrist would hurt the next morning, but not very much. No more than Morning's hands.