One to Count Cadence

5. (Notes for an Unfinished Narrative)

History, memory, or whatever you will call this foolish desire of mine to diddle the past, does present certain problems of relativity. It would be easier if I could, as authors of novels often pretend to do, be that objective, original, imaginative, righteous voice of God, but alas I am not. Nor am I able, as that other great multitude of confessors are, to act as if I have quietly moved, probably because of the deep understanding and perception I must have of my sins, to some distant point in the vacuum of space, disturbed only by occasional satellites, cosmic dust, and God, and there rest in peace as I recount my many and varied adventures. But again, alas, this is not so. For you see, I am still strapped to this bed in a traction cast, the sky over Baguio is still a sexual blue, the grass sensual green, Abigail Light lovely, lovely, and Doctor Gallard concerned. Life continually intrudes. I will neither deny this, as so many have, nor, though, will I make any other point about it than this intrusion. I see no reason why you should get off any lighter than me, for it was at this point in time – that is, the time of writing the narrative rather than the time of the narrative itself, different as it is from the time of the events being narrated – that Gallard brought me these sheets of yellow paper and this old typewriter, which so often seems to loom high over the bed like a great cathedral organ. Gallard brought them without explanation, but he and I both knew what he meant, what he wanted.

I found myself intrigued with the idea of a mechanical confession and began, as they say great writers must, to conceive my theory of aesthetics before I began to write. I quickly discovered that history was more interesting than art, and so instead developed the Blueberry Bush Theory of History, that is to say that Martin Luther King had as great a hand in causing the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War as Martin Luther. You may despair at this idea that no one and no thing is at the wheel of the ship of the cosmos, that there is neither wheel nor ship, but you would be smarter to laugh (and probably are if you did). Perhaps you may chide me for making elaborate jokes; point, if you will, your irritation elsewhere.

If, as they say, the writer's duty is to force order on the chaos, then the historian must force chaos wherever he finds order.

Perhaps this is all a personal reaction to the fact that I never did find out who broke all those damned Coke bottles, and I'm merely hesitating in my narrative because I hate to go on with that kind of loose thread bleeding behind me. If it bothers you, then say I did it because I was punished for it and must be guilty. Nothing worth having is easy to get.

So despair then because history is no thread to be cut, no chain to rattle, no string to be wrapped in a ball. Eat your blueberries; keep the toilet paper close at hand.

My ill-temper must have rubbed off on the men, particularly on Morning who acted as if I had stolen his thunder, his lightning and tears. I didn't find it easy in the weeks between the end of my tour of punishment and the beginning of football season to keep the self-disgust I felt out of my face. There were several bad scenes. Novotny finally received the long-feared Dear John from his girl back in Wyoming. He stayed sick and drunk for a long time – through a set of days, the Break, then a set of swings – then during the Break he and Morning nearly came to blows, as they regularly did, over the presence of Toni, Morning's queer friend, at the apartment. Morning felt sorry for him, as everyone did. Poor Toni, half in, half out of drag, short hair and make-up, high heels and levis, painted fingernails and a sport shirt, always waiting for a chance to seduce Novotny, Novotny always ready to kill him if he tried, and Morning, it seemed, also waiting for the explosion. I often felt that Morning wanted to see this double-humiliation so he could feel superior (not afraid?). He and I hassled when I told him this, for in my mood I bluntly told him, and we tangled another time when Quinn wanted to stay in town AWOL from work. Morning said it was only Quinn's business, but I made it mine. Then Dottlinger began his campaign to get Morning who, of course, was more than willing to be a martyr to this sort of injustice. And I… always with my crooked nose strained out of joint to get between the back and the whip…

On the way to the beginning of a set of mids, I found Tetrick sitting in the chow hall waiting for me. As I ate, he told me that Dottlinger knew that Morning had organized the Great Coke Bottle Mutiny.

"How do you know?" I asked. This could be bad, I thought. Capt. Saunders still wasn't back from the States.

"I know, that's all. But the lieutenant ain't going to do anything right now. He's waiting. Make sure Morning don't get out of line, not even a little bit," Tetrick said.

"How?"

"You tell me," he said, shaking his head over a cup of coffee. "You tell me. These kids are driving me to drink. You know Hendricks, that little blond kid on Trick Four?"

"I think so. Why?"

"He's in the stockade – excuse me, confinement facility, that is," Tetrick snorted.

"How come?"

"How come? He's a lover. That's why. Girls in Town aren't good enough for him. No, he's got to have a captain's wife. He got caught, then she screamed rape like they always do when an enlisted man gets between their legs. She screams rape from the middle of her bed and Hendricks crashes out the window carrying his clothes. It's bad enough to run off, but then the Air Police catch him over behind the Kelly Theatre, and what's he do? Pulls a knife, yes, cuts two APs, which is bad enough, but now when he can get away, what's he do? Yeah, he climbs a telephone pole. They have to cut the pole down to get him. Smart kid. Now the least he'll get is five years and a DD. A real lover." Tetrick couldn't have looked more unhappy, he couldn't have had more wrinkles running back across his forehead up his tan scalp if he were the one on his way to Leavenworth.

I remembered Hendricks. A small, quiet boy from Kansas who worked part-time out at the riding stables, the kind of kid who preferred horses to people. "Damn, you wouldn't think he would be the type, do you? Can he beat any of the charges?"

Tetrick sneered at me, but then he paused, chuckled to himself, and said, "Speaking of people who don't look like it. Listen, keep this to yourself; don't make me more trouble. Guess who's shacking up with Sgt. Reid's wife?" Reid was chief of Trick One, a pale, thin, thirtyish guy who looked more like a shoe clerk than a soldier.

"Who," I said, "Dottlinger?" A joke.

"That's right, smart guy."

"You're shitting me."

"Wish I was. Reid doesn't know who yet, but he knows. She's always been that kind. His last CO shipped him out to get rid of her. I'll get her sent home when Saunders gets back, but can you see me going to the lieutenant and saying, 'I got this slut, see, for you to send home.' " Tetrick grinned, but I think in defense.

"Listen," I said, "next time you have some good news, be sure to tell me."

"You just tell Morning to stay straight." The grin was quickly gone. "If he makes waves, I'll bust his ass. He won't have to wait for the Lieutenant to think up something."

"Ain't it the truth."

I left Tetrick with his bad coffee and troubles; I had my own; he had given them to me my first day in the PI. On the way to work I was tempted to tell Morning that Dottlinger knew, but I was afraid that, in his mood, he would take the warning as excuse for action against the enemy, and I guess I was a little afraid, too, that in my mood I might egg him on.

Two nights later I had the OD and the Trick went to work a mid without me. Most of them were more than a little drunk at midnight chow, but Novotny was assistant trick chief and I trusted him to keep them working. At least they trooped out toward the motor pool on time, so I went back to the quiet Orderly Room and the novel Morning had forced on me, The Wanderer, which I managed to read until the phone rang about forty-five minutes after midnight. The CQ looked up at me and said, "Sgt. Reid." Now it was my turn to wander, lost again.

"What the hell's he want?"

"Didn't say."

"Reid?" I said into the receiver.

"Sgt. Krummel?" he said. He always called me "Sgt. Krummel" out of military courtesy. "Ah, where's the relief?"

No rest for the weary, I wanted to say, his voice was so tired. "Why? Aren't they there? Where are you? What?" My rush of questions silenced him. I heard a sigh slip over the wire.

"Ah, where's your Trick? They didn't, ah, show up, and it's, ah, an, ah, hour past relief now. Ah, my guys are, ah, complaining." He never would have complained, but would have stayed at the desk at Operations working on through eternity with an occasional guilty glance at the wall clock, knowing that if he complained they would only shove the dirty end of the stick at him again. The note of resignation in his voice seemed to say, Yes, I know my wife is fucking around; don't all of them.

I assured him that the Trick had left the mess hall on time, reassured him that it was merely a broken down three-quarter or something so simple, and promised to check it out right away. I hung up in the middle of one of his "ah's"; there could be no relief for a man like Reid.

The night driver in the motor pool, a mongoloid from Alabama, had refused to let the Trick use two jeeps in place of a, yes, disabled three-quarter because motor-pool policy specified only, one "vehickle purr trick." "They gave me some shit, man, but I tole 'em to hop their little ole Yankee asses in a cab or somethin'," he said to me.

"Thanks a lot."

"Motor-pool policy," he said, waving his arm at the dew-shining green metal and black asphalt, the dull canvas, the flood lights so quickly absorbed by the dank, dark air.

"Motor-pool policy," he said again, as if that explained the world.

"If there is any trouble out of this, soldier, I'm going to have your ass in a sling by noon tomorrow," I said, savoring for a moment the amazement lighting, as best anything could, that peckerwood face. "Shut up and get me a jeep real fast," I said as he started to answer, "Now." Rank does have its privileges, but only seldom do the privileged have the rank.

I found the Trick about a mile out the gate highway, walking in a shambling group, and I assumed they were looking for a cab until I saw the case of beer on Morning's shoulder, the bottles flashing in every hand. Franklin was taking a leak as he walked and the others were trying to stay out of range; Quinn had a beer in each hand, taking alternate drinks with military precision. I pulled up behind them and their faces and hands scrambled for a moment trying to hide the beer, then Quinn saw me getting out of the jeep and he smiled and shouted, "Hey, Morning, get old man Krummel a beer."

"Throw the beer in the ditch and fall in," I said.

They all smiled and walked toward me, Morning with an offered beer.

"Throw the beer in the ditch and fall in," I repeated. Smiles became perplexed. "Now!" They huddled back upon themselves. "Right now!" Collins bent over to try to set his beer down without spilling it. "Throw them in the ditch." He did. Morning threw the beer he had been offering me, flung it against the ground, and his eyes glared "what the shit" but he was too angry to say it. "Fall in!"

"What the fuck's with you, Krummel?"

"Sgt. Krummel to you, Pfc Morning," I said as I took the half-empty case off his shoulder and pitched it in the ditch. Again his anger stifled his voice, and in his silence the others attempted a formation based on his unmoving figure.

"Attention," I ordered, and attention I got as they gathered old instincts and shuffled into straighter lines, stiffer stances. Morning still stood at an angle, half-crouched as if his anger curled his guts, his face scattered in wrath, mouth open, an eyebrow questioningly raised, a mad eye, the whole structure flushed in frustration, quilted in grief. I told him to straighten up. He did, and rage tightened his body into quivering stone, the first tentative nudge of an earthquake. He began to stammer, his lips jittering and a spray of spit flying out; but I told him to knock it off before his mouth could shape a word.

"Dress right, dress!" Again the training memories came back after a wondering moment. Morning had his mouth shut now, his face clenched like a fist; thumb screws, bamboo splinters, nor the rack could have made him say shit – but I did.

"I don't know what kind of little gathering this is, but I want you people to know, it's over."

"Shit."

"One more word, Morning," I hissed into his very face, "even a grunt, and you are through." Before he could test me, I shouted, "Right face. Forward march. Double-time march," and then he was trapped with the others, stumbling along the road. "Novotny, fall out and see if you can keep cadence for these girl scouts." I climbed back in the jeep and followed them as they ran the two miles on out to Operations. Everyone threw up at least once, and Haddad had to be half-carried half dragged between Quinn and Collins. All their backs reflected the shame which was on their faces; except Morning. They all knew something, except Morning; not so much their error, because that wasn't important, but the breaking of a trust, making me have to play the hard-ass (perhaps more ass than hard). A broken trust, a defiled faith, so we were all ashamed. Except Morning, and his anger spoke eloquently of the guilt he bore. We both knew whose idea the beer had been, and I wondered if this confrontation hadn't been what he had been after all this time. His rage blossomed so wonderfully when he was guilty; he indulged his anger, perhaps because with something outside to hate the vague phantom-demon he hated in himself let him alone, and together both halves hated not in an arithmetical progression of one plus one, but geometrically as dynamite adds to dynamite, so that he must explode. The others would be loosed from their shame by this run, and then a single joke, a laugh, and then we would be back in this thing together. But I wondered if Morning and I would have to fight to ease his guilt. I thought this might be the easy way (and I sometimes, when bed sores tickle my guilt, think it might have been the best way). His guilt, my shame eased in a blind flurry of fists, and afterwards battered faces, grins splitting bleeding lips, friendship cemented – but only if we fought to a draw, for neither of us could bear to lose in front of the other – his guilt, my shame eased. (Let me mention, lest you think I worried overlong about doing my job, that mine was perhaps the easier to endure. I was riding in the jeep, and he was struggling in the ditch. The twentieth century hasn't quite convinced me that physical pain is easier to bear than mental pain. Not quite. Keep that in mind.)

I hailed two taxis and sent them to Ops where they were waiting; the drivers laughing at the panting, puking rabble I herded into the compound. Reid met me at the gate with pale questions and whimpering objections, but I shut him up with a promise that we would make up twice the time the next two nights and told him that everything was all right. That's what he wanted to hear: that everything was all right. Had he for a moment suspected that his wife's lover had arranged this delay? His face answered, Don't they always.

I told him that I would appreciate it if that dick-head Dottlinger didn't hear about the incident. He hesitated before answering, and I wanted to scream the truth at him. But he was really worried about who was going to pay for the cabs. So I did. Then I went to get Morning and we went out back.

Turning from me, he walked over to the fence, anger still shaking his hands. "Well, what the hell you want?" he asked when I didn't say anything.

"What do I want? What do you want? A stunt like that – Jesus Christ, Morning."

"So I screwed up, man. So what? Didn't you ever make a mistake? Didn't this shit ever get to you? Is it ever too much?"

"What?"

"I don't know," he said, turning as the beacon on the control tower turned. "Just too much."

"You make me sound like a sergeant: but that's no excuse. We're all in the same shit."

"It's not a fucking excuse, it's a reason. Can't…" Silent for a moment, he turned back to the fence, hung his fingers in the mesh, staring out like a… like lost child? caged animal?… more like a man who didn't know if he wanted in or out, or even which side was in or out. "I'm just tired, man. I feel like I'm nine hundred years old. It's all too much, the army, Town, this stupid job; it's too much sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep forever, then I wouldn't have to fuck with the world. I can't stay straight; I can't even go to hell right." He paused; I waited.

"That's funny. I was thinking about something today, you know. About problems. I used to be good at math, you know," he said, speaking as he had that first time I saw him talking to the mirror, detached, commenting on his soul as if it were a problem of formulas. "Really good at math. I should have majored in math or physics or engineering or something like that. At least that's what they always said, and I might have, if I hadn't tried to major in accounting to spite my old lady. God, you know, she used to put my old man down for being a bookkeeper. A cipher, she called him. Classic, huh? So classic it's a bore, you know.

"But there was another reason, too, why I didn't major in math. I didn't understand… I couldn't… I could work problems, could really work hell out of them. And not just plugging numbers into a formula either. When I started calculus, in high school, the teacher gave us a problem, something about getting a ladder around a corner in a hall, just to show us what one looked like. And I worked the damn thing without calculus. She couldn't believe it. She loved me because I was her best student, but for a moment I could tell that she thought I had done something wrong, and she never liked me after that for some reason. But I worked the damned problem, by God, I worked it, just like I solved all the other ones, but the thing is, the thing always was, I didn't know how I knew how to work it. I didn't understand why my mind worked that way. No one else could work it, but it was easy for me, but I didn't know why, or how. I could just do, you know, but I couldn't understand how, and that almost drove me bugs, man.

"Just like when I started school. I could read before I started the first grade, and I knew that no one else could, so when this old bitch starts off with flash cards and the alphabet crap, I raised my hand and asked, "Where are the books?" The class all laughed and giggled, and Miss Minder, who was old and hated kids, probably for good reason, threw a fourth-grade reader in my hands and told me to read and so I read, and when I finished a page, said, "Where are the hard books? This is only a fourth-grade reader." All the kids laughed and Miss Minder almost cried she was so mad, and I thought I was going to be the leader of the band. But I quickly discovered that nobody liked me because I could read and they couldn't, and then they didn't like me because I made good grades. So for the next eight years, until it became all right to be smart, I was the dirtiest, dumbest kid in school. On purpose." He paused as four jets roared over then settled like fat mallards against the runways.

"Always had trouble with my head, man. But in high school I let it go; it was enough to be able to do it. It was like football: when the coaches tried to teach me how to throw a pass, tried to change the way I threw a pass, I couldn't pass for shit, but my way, I could do it. Finally they left me alone, and I just threw the goddamned ball. But then that got to me too. Somehow I wasn't throwing the ball, somebody else was. Or maybe it was more like having a machine in my head that plotted trajectories and found ranges and figured windage and force vectors and triggered the muscles. I always felt left out of the process."

"No," I interrupted, taking the cigarette he offered, "you are the process."

"Aw, bullshit, that's no good. I'm not part, if I don't feel like I'm part, huh? No.

"Then," he said, pausing to light up, his face fired by the match, crimson like the hot exhausts of the jets coming over our heads, "Then at Carlton I found out something. The hard way." He laughed, but it sounded more like a snort. "I was making it with this chick, this good chick, down in Madison. A good kid but, Jesus, a bad scene. I was drunk most of the time, and mad at her most of the time for reasons I still don't understand. Maybe because she made me happy, maybe for no reason at all. But I'd get mad, madder than hell, then I'd tear her into little pieces. I made fun of her Church, her meatless Fridays – here's a piece of meat for this Friday, I'd say – her family, her friends, then I'd screw her and make her cry with passion, then laugh at her hypocritical tears, as I called them." He nicked his cigarette over the fence, then walked back into the shadows next to the building.

"But she loved me, man, and she hung on, though God knows why. All the way. Until one really bad night when I was drunk, blind, stupid, black-out drunk, laying on the floor of her apartment, beating my head on the tiles, keeping time to the music from the beer joint below. I busted my head all up and bled all over the place, broke furniture and all that kind of shit. And that was all right; but I wouldn't stop it with the head, beating away, and she couldn't stop me, and I wouldn't stop until I finally drank and battered myself into oblivion." He lit another cigarette. His face was as tired as his voice in the quick light.

"Then the next morning she said, very calmly, very plainly, that this was too much. "Too much, Joe,' she said. 'You hate yourself too much. Either I'll get lost when you get your head and heart together, or else I'll get torn up in the fight. That's too much,' she said.

"I hated losing her," he said, looking up at me, "and I gave her all the horseshit about being afraid to live and too ignorant to die, which was just true enough to really hurt – I seem to know weak spots naturally, too – but I sort of understood something about myself, why I'd been beating my head on the floor. I hated it, pure and simple, and in spite of my new attempts at being an intellectual, I hated my head because it wasn't part of me. It has always felt like somebody's head besides mine, and I didn't understand, and I hated. She didn't understand either, but she knew enough to get the hell out of the way. Enough." He stopped talking again, and a jet engine being tested filled the silence with a steady, grating roar which seemed to rise out of the very night itself. Something was waiting in the darkness, an animal, a beast, all mouth and desire, growling, eating the very darkness, dissatisfied with the night.

"So what the hell did you want?" he said suddenly, shaking his head.

"I thought I wanted to beat your damned head in. But I guess I… I guess not. Let's go in before that noise makes idiots of us all. Stay cool. Lt. Dottlinger is after your ass; he knows that you were the organizer of the mutiny."

Morning started to say something, stopped, then said, "Don't sweat it. I can take my own licks. If he wants me so much I may let him have all of me." A rice bug, a pale cockroach-looking, flying beast as big as your thumb, crawled along the sidewalk, stunned from dashing into the wall under the floodlights. Morning stomped him into a brown spot

"He's smarter than you think, and he's drowning, Joe and he'll hurt you. He knows how to do that, if nothing else " I said, pausing at the door.

"You should know," he said, grinning like Novotny. "They can't hurt me, man. Not any more."

"Not if you keep setting me up for the kill," I said, smiling too.

Inside I shouted something about the Trick calling me if they needed to go to the latrine because after tonight it was obvious that they couldn't pee without it running down their legs. They laughed, shot me the finger, assaulted my mother's virtue, and we were all okay again. I told Novotny to police up the beer bottles on the way in.

"Hey, I'm ah… I'm…" he tried to say.

"Next time you want to get in some close order drill, tell me. I'll arrange it."

"Don't do us any favors," Morning said as I left.

It was over for now, and I enjoyed the cool peace of the night on my way back.

But, God, it's never over. The finger of God is never satisfied always moving, always rewriting life, always making a scene go on and on until even He must cry, "God, will it never end," even as His finger moves on.

"Where are they at?" Tetrick shouted at me as he came in the Orderly Room the next morning. Red splotches of frustration interrupted the yellow of his face. "You've got to be kidding me? Say it ain't so. Get 'em in here, Krummel, now. Every one of them." I managed between flying arms and screams to get him into Saunders' office. "Whatever you're gonna say, no! already. I want those idiots in here."

"No," I said.

"What do you mean, no?" he shouted.

"They're my trick. You said so. I took care of it. You hang them, you hang me."

"I should hang myself. How could they do a thing like that? The Lieutenant will kill us all," he said.

"He'll never know."

"He knows everything. He has a spy system better than the CIA. God," he groaned, rubbing his shining head, "what's next? No, don't tell me. I couldn't stand it."

"Football season is next. Three weeks, then all the anger can go somewhere else." I felt as if I should comfort him, maybe pat his shoulder, because he really did care about his troops. I'd never seen anybody like Tetrick before.

"Football, huh? Maybe you will all get killed." He shuffled out as fast as his feet would let him. I followed. Dottlinger was standing in the middle of the door waiting for someone to call "Attention." Dottlinger gave "At ease" his usual arrogant inflection, which made it mean exactly the opposite: "Don't relax a second," it said. He raised an eyebrow as if to ask what we had been doing in Saunders' office, but he didn't ask; he had other things on his mind; he was next.

No one ever quite figured how Dottlinger came up with the idea, but he did, and that same day he called a Pfc from the motor pool, a repairman from Trick Four, and Morning into his office to inform them that a board of officers would be assembled to decide if they should be undesirably discharged for immoral conduct. The other two were real trouble-makers – the Pfc got his kicks by beating up whores, and the repairman had gotten written up by the APs every time he went to Town – but Morning's only sin was reporting three cases of the clap to the hospital.

Nearly everyone caught the clap in the PI; I think the official rate is about sixty percent, but that doesn't take into account the married men with wives and without who were faithful, nor unreported cased treated by doctors in Town, which would probably put the rate for single enlisted men around eighty percent. Everyone on the trick except Collins and myself had fallen prey to the sly gonococci. Collins was reasonably faithful to his wife and extraordinarily careful about not catching the clap, wearing two condoms, only fucking on Wednesday afternoons when the whores received the results of their Tuesday morning smears, always carrying a bar of antiseptic soap in his pocket, and other such precautions which seemed to take the fun out of it, which may have been exactly what he was trying to do. I had already had my punishment from a sixteen-year-old high school girl in Atlanta, Georgia, on a three-day pass in 1953, and so I was somewhat more cautious than the others. Franklin had had six doses; he claimed one more notch than Quinn with five. But like everyone else, they went to the doctors in Town for their penicillin, so the hospital never knew. But Morning always said that he wasn't going to take any chances with such a fun thing as his privates; no hypos of Wildroot Cream Oil masquerading as pencillin for him. So he went to the hospital all three times, the last time about a month before. The hospital always made a routine report of the third case to the unit commanders, but usually a bit of fatherly advice was all that happened. Service policy had changed from the days when a dose was an automatic bust; in fact thousands of posters pleaded with the troops to report to the hospital and promised no disciplinary measures. But an undesirable discharge is an administrative action, technically, so Dottlinger had his way to Morning.

Perhaps Dottlinger understood that, being a good (really), middle-class Southern boy, Morning probably felt guilty as hell about the doses anyway and that he probably bought the usual nonsense paraded everywhere in America – schools, colleges, corporations – that achievement is measured by collecting pieces of paper, and that a bad piece of paper, a bad discharge, like a criminal record, would haunt a man right into the grave (when in reality, no one ever asks to see your goddamned discharge anyway).

At first Morning seemed unconcerned, as if he understood the game and could care less about playing it. He drank the ritual fifth of VO, then tied the yellow and black ribbon from the neck of the bottle into his button hole, identifying him as a short-timer. He strutted around laughing and quipping, "I'm so short I can sleep in a matchbox, so short that when I fart, I blow sand in my eyes, so short." But I saw, perhaps, a truer picture of how he was taking it one night during the next Break in the weight room.

(I lift weights, barbells, you understand; it's been a secret long enough. I like it, in fact, I'm very snobbish about it. I dislike people with skinny arms who call it boring; I dislike pretty boys with their definition bulging and rippling like snakes coiling in a sack; I dislike hulks who think a 400-pound miliary press is the highest man can reach; but at the same time I've held each of these attitudes once, and am now quite sure that mine is unique, far superior, perhaps the only worthy attitude. I think weight lifting is beautiful, an art of circles, curves and graceful arcs, a delicate symmetry, an hypnotic calm in the repetition, a powerful contentment when the skin seems too small for the muscle.)

I was nearly finished with the workout, pleased with my body, really pleased that I had finally kept one resolution to spend a peaceful Break away from Town, when, through the louvers, I saw Morning get out of a cab. The light in the weight room was the only light on the second floor so his eyes rose naturally to it, but because of the artful deception of the screen, he couldn't see me. But he shouted, anyway, "Lift and toil, Krummelkeg, you virtuous, muscle-bound, ant-brained idiot."

"Ah, 'tis Daemon Rum his-self," I answered.

Shortly, he came in, more tired than drunk, face sunburnt and drawn, but his eyes glittered like glass ornaments. The bow of his short-timer's ribbon, untied, drooped like a pennant in the rain.

I asked why he was back, suspecting the worst.

"Just tired," he said, fooling me again, rubbing the stubble of beard. "I been sweatin'… sitting in a swing all day. Talkin', talkin' to a sweet little girl."

"You found a new way," I grunted, doing my first set of squats.

"No, man, really, a little girl. Bow-legged Dottie's little girl. Went over with Quinn to fence some records for… so Dottie could. Anyway, he had to screw her first, and they made me take the kid out to the swing, you know, one of those old-fashioned bench swings." He sat heavily on the edge of the mat, then flopped back, an arm covering his eyes. "So, man, I spent all morning popping bennies and drinking beer while Quinn was farting around. Then he and Dottie went off to sell the stuff and made me stay with the kid, but by then I wouldn't have left for anything. Great kid, lotsa bennies, and the kid would run to the sari-sari store for beer. She fixed us lunch, like a party. Beautiful lunch. First time I ever noticed how pretty food is. Tomatoes about the size of your thumb, tiny little red things; white rice, as white as the sun; little bitty raw fish, churds, or chaps or something, little gray devils; and those great little bananas sort of hovering between green and yellow. Hey, man, one of the bananas was a twin, you know, two bananas in one skin. Dottie's kid said that's the best kinda luck, twin bananas. She said if we ate them, the two of us, we would get married, and I said she didn't want to marry me 'cause I was no good, and she said she did want to marry me 'cause I was so sad. Ain't that great, man. So sad. Jesus Christ, what a kid. Nine years old, man, and she knows more about life than Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, and your fucking Edmund Burke all thrown together in Archimedes' bathtub." He laughed and sat up. "Hey, man, you ever see how silly you look doing squats. You look like the most constipated man in the world." He laughed again.

I finished the squats and put the weights up. "So go on. You got Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine and my fucking Edmund Burke in Archimedes' tub singing 'Im Forever Blowing Stinky Bubbles in the Tub.' "

"No, man, Plato don't allow no singing. Aristotle ain't singing, it ain't in the plan; he's just sitting there farting and bitin' the bubbles when they come up and calling it a catharsis. Ca-fucking-tharsis! Augustine is trying to hide a hard-on, and Edmund Burke is casting a baleful eye on the whole proceedings, wishing he had a hard-on," he crowed, "and Archimedes run off with a belly-dancer from Bayonne, New Jersey, who promised to teach him about spirals and specific gravity and the Archimedean screw."

"Maybe you shouldn't drink so much," I said.

"Maybe I should drink more," he answered. "Particularly with lovely, sweet little girls. 'Joe Morning,' she said when I left, 'How come you GIs all-a-time drunk?' I think I love her."

"Yes, Pfc Morning, we've noted your interest in the younger members of opposite sex," I said, mocking Dottlinger's dry whine. In my own voice, I asked, "How many packages of gum did she sell you?" Dottie's kid was one of the better con artists among the horde of gum and flower girls with bare feet and scraggly hair who were constantly in bars, day in day out, constant reminders of poverty and want, a constant whine at your sleeve, "You buy gum, joe?"

Morning was silent for a second, then said, "You don't believe in shit do you? Well, fuck you, golden-hearted cynic."

"Don't sweat me, jack; I won't be sitting on the board. They can't make me tell about that twelve-year-old girl in Chew Chi's hotel – at least she said she was twelve, didn't she?" The night I had shared that black, rat-ridden room with the old woman, my first night in Town, digging, as it were, into the past, Morning had asked Dominic for something young and tender, and received, he discovered the next morning, a twelve-year-old girl in a red crepe-paper party dress with clumsy white valentine hearts stitched around the skirt.

"I was drunk."

"You're drunk now. Don't snarl at me just because Dottlinger is after your ass. You made your own bed," I said. (God, he could make me angry, and I, him.) "You didn't tell me how much gum she stuck you with."

A sleepy grin wavered about his eyes as he emptied the pockets of the baggy light-blue pants he wore to Town. "I ain't counted 'em, yet." He smiled. Twenty-six shiny green packages of Doublemint. "It was worth it; I love her. I think I love her."

"I think you ought to go to bed."

"No, sir. Benzedrine and sex don't mix."

"To sleep."

"I can't sleep; I'm too tired." He paused, fingered his ribbon. "I'm too short to sleep; might miss my plane."

"Don't sweat that. You can beat this thing," I said. "Easy."

"Shit, man, you ought to read Slutfinger's instructions to the board. 'Subjects may show superficial intelligence and verbal ability, and attempt to make philosophical justification for immorality, but the board must keep the good of the service in mind rather than some vague good-of-man ideal that allows certain types of immorality, usually sexual, as long as the higher principles are followed. The board must remember that immorality is immorality.' God, he loved reading it to me. I think he wrote it for me. Jesus, he's crazy. It's not me he's putting out of the army 'for the good of the service,' it's the whole twentieth century. Morning, Joseph J., unsuitable, sir, for duty in the service of God and Country because of a lewd and lascivious character established by the prima-facie evidence of three contractions of the vile disease of gonorrhea, an article fifteen company punishment for being caught off-limits in one of the most notorious dens of prostitution in the whole Philippines, if not the whole world, naked and, we can assume, having had subjected himself to carnal intercourse with these low women, and keeping constant company with a reputed pander and black-marketeer and an admitted homosexual, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera."

"Did he say all that."

"No, but he will. He wants to, but he can't spell all the words." He stood up, walked to the screen, leaving a trail of dirty footprints across the canvas mat. "He's gonna have my ass, like you said, one way or the other. Who gives a shit, really? They can't hurt me."

"You can beat it. I'll testify, Tetrick will, maybe even Capt. Harry if we push him."

"I'm not going to try. I'm tired, man. I told you that. I want to get out of this fucking, stupid, dirty country and the dumb goddamned army. I'm going back to the States." He leaned his forehead against the screen. "Home for a while, then maybe back to Phoenix, maybe back to school…"

"Not this way, for Christ's sake." I picked up a dumbbell and began doing one-handed curls. "We can beat it."

"… maybe Mississippi. I've got a friend with SNCC there." He mumbled on, but I wasn't listening.

"Ellen's in Mississippi," I said absently. Mississippi looked as if it were going to once again take its toll on me. First Ellen and Ron Fowlers, now Joe Morning, I thought. Then an odd picture intruded, Joe and Ellen in bed. Somehow I knew if they met, and in Mississippi they must, she would fuck him with all that wonderful, religious, rebellious ardor she once spread for me. After long nights of talk, she had to have me, as if the words caressed her, a long flickering tongue of talk, and have me she did, a mount and a sudden charge. Even now the stale cigarette breath ripened by cheap beer, the dry lips, the sticky tongue, the hot, hot breath of a woman talking close and intense in your face… I was suddenly sorry I hadn't gone with her to Mississippi that summer; but no – she had said, love me, love my cause – no, I said. But that pale hot face, pale mouth cuddling like a sleepy kitten against mine… "Huh?" I said as Morning poked me. My arm still curled absent mindedly, the muscles tight and hard and bitter now. "What?"

"Go take a shower," he muttered, turning back to the night. "You stink."

As I showered, he came down and we talked, but he seemed resigned, and refused to fight Dottlinger. (I recognize it now: The victim by falling may rise; one vanquished without a fight isn't vanquished at all.) Afterwards we strolled to the Flight Line for a sandwich. Lightning skittered across the clouded face of Mount Arayat, silent flashes, then distant afterthoughts of quiet thunder. The walks and the streets and the grass gleamed wetly in the mist, the mist like tiny balls of light suspended in the cool night, the heart and coming of the rainy season delicately foretold. In spite of the threatening rain, the hesitant thunder, we walked quite slowly, speaking of home, of girls once touched, once known, of friends half-forgotten, drunken rides and football games. Once again Morning spoke of the girl from Madison. His face, drawn in fatigue, echoed the longing in his voice:

"God, man, I miss her sometimes. Nights like this, sometimes in my rack just at dawn when the light is soft and the air… so much I don't think I can stand it." He shook his head. "But, Christ, I'd probably just treat her the same way again. Shit. You know what I did once. I was drunk again, always, and we'd fought, always, but had half made-up and were making love on her couch, covered with tears and recriminations, but then she whispered something desperate about love – we'd prom… I'd made her promise never to say "love" – then all the anger came back, and I jerked out, then sat on the side of the couch, jacking off. She started crying again, moaning, and asking me "why? why?" in this goddamned sad little whimper. So I told her why, good old Joe Morning told her why: 'Less complicated than fucking you, bitch.' Isn't that lovely. You know, I wonder why she took so long to leave me." He looked up, waiting, it seemed, for me to speak. When I didn't, he seemed embarrassed by the confidence, and quickly walked on.

"Some of my best friends are bastards," I said as I caught up to him.

He smiled, then poked me on the arm, and said, "Yeah. Mine, too."

After eating sawdust hamburgers, we went back to the barracks and drank a fifth of Dewar's he had been saving for the market, sipping straight from the bottle, then dashing to the water fountain for a chaser, but by the time a sullen grey daylight floated like fog out of the dawn, we were chasing Scotch with Scotch, dreams with whiskey, laughter with tears.

At noon Novotny found Morning sleeping under my table, his head on the Lattimore translation of the Iliad that Ellen had given me for Christmas the third year we were married. It might have been a more suitable pillow for me, but I was on guard, crouched in the corner, asleep but not dreaming, the empty bottle cradled in my arms, a dead soldier.

I stayed abed and nursed my hangover the next day, but Morning was up before three and back in Town. Novotny, Quinn and Cagle brought him back just before curfew. He had passed out in Lenny's, and when they tried to move him upstairs, he woke up insane. With the arms draped around Novotny's and Quinn's shoulders he banged their heads together, then turned and ran out over Cagle. By the time they had collected themselves and gotten outside, Morning had disappeared, but they heard screams from the Keyhole, and raced there. Morning had ripped the door from its hinges as he ran in and had shouted, "I'm gonna kill me an airman." When the others came in, Morning was chasing the smallest airman in the world around and around a table. They wrestled him outside just as the Air Police jeep drove up. Luckily, Novotny knew one of the APs and persuaded him to let them take Morning back to base.

He woke me screaming and shouting as they tried to tug him out of the taxi. Novotny and Quinn finally sat on his back while Cagle tied his hands behind him; Cagle was gagging him with a dirty handkerchief when I got downstairs. A steady rain began to slant across the bands of light as we picked Morning up. Perhaps the rain, perhaps the drink, something had washed the mask from his face. As I leaned over to grasp his shoulders, the hate blazed from his eyes, stunning, savage, blood-lined eyes directing malevolence, loathing, and God-forbidden hate; the mad, mad eyes of St. John the Divine casting God's wrath and bitterness against the fruit of man, great, blood-lust hate to cleanse the world in blood and fare. "… And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of the wrath of God…" How many times had I heard Morning shouting that mad verse in a drunken and surely, half-serious vein. His anger condemned the earth, and I nearly dropped him when his hate flamed up at my face. I might have dropped him, but the eyes suddenly clouded and the mask returned like the closing of a great portal, a thick iron door trundled across the opening in the earth, sealing the rift in the crust which sank deep into the night, into the fire of eternal night.

Upstairs we threw him into the center of the stall and turned all the showers cold, turned them on him. He lay very still, his eyes closed. His previous noise had drawn a crowd, but Morning remained motionless, bathed in the rushing water, silent, until even the group of curious began to leave. By then the leather belt stretched enough, so he slipped his hands out. He sat up, untied his feet, but left the gag. Sitting there, his eyes clouded by streams of water, he very methodically removed his shoes, his fingers operating so exactly on the laces, denying their wet, wrinkled infirmity. Quickly, he threw his shoes at us. One, wet, slipped out of his hand and hit the ceiling; the other speared Cagle in the shin. While Cagle danced on one leg, we laughed, then were silent as we realized the silence, the waterfall silence, that we had broken for the first time. Before this, not a single word had been spoken.

Morning responded to the laughter. He scrabbled to his feet and began a damp, slippery stripper's parody of sloshy bumps and clammy grinds. He went on for long minutes, dancing, stripping, until he wore only the jockey shorts he wore to Town and the gag binding his face as tightly as wire imbedded around a live tree trunk. He did much more, stuffed his shorts down the drain, fell down, ripped the gag from his mouth and began screaming "Mother-fucker! Mother-fucker!" until finally we carried him to his bunk, tied him with web belts and shoe laces, gagged him once more, then left him to his struggles and dreams.

On the way to our rooms, Novotny said, "Just crazy. Sometimes he's just crazy. One time he's drunk okay, then he's crazier than a poisoned coyote. I saw him run through a wall in his girl's apartment in Madison one night just 'cause she had the rag on and wouldn't put out for him. Crazy. Don't know." He turned into his room, his broad back wrinkling in perplexity, a discomfort I also shared. Who knew Joe Morning? Surely not I.

From my bunk I could hear his teeth gritting, grinding through the gag, his cot rattling against the cold concrete floor, his bonds aching against the flesh, his voice, muted, silent, persuasive in the night.

I woke, wondered why because it was still dark, but then realized the silence. More out of sleepy habit than purpose, I got up to glance toward Morning's room and saw him wrapped in a blanket, walking slowly toward the stairwell. I dressed and followed, half-cursing, twice-intrigued (God, it seems as if I spent my whole life trailing after Morning, following him; two vaudeville acts, he the magician, me the strong man with a magic of my own, forever on the same endless circuit). I found him in one of the drainage ditches at the edge of the company area. The rain had changed to drizzle gently floating from gray, clotted clouds drifting ten feet above the barracks.

"You take me to raise?" he asked as I stood above and behind him.

"You came so I would follow," I said. "You all right?" I asked, climbing into the ditch with him.

"I'm always all right. Or I would be if you'd stop following me around like a maiden aunt worried about my virtue."

"I'm a member of the Dottlinger spy organization." I sat down, but he said nothing and his silence hung as close as the clouds about us. Out of the American tradition of male comradeship I offered him a cigarette as I might have a wounded soldier, but the rain killed my match and he threw it away. We sat for a long time in the stolid mists before he spoke.

"You know," he said, "I've done this about once every six months for the last five or so years. Stupid, crazy drunk. And I never know what starts it, never know why.

"It wasn't always like that. I remember the first time I got drunk. It was down in Georgia. At a lake. You know, one of those sad places high school boys go because there are supposed to be, everybody says there are, millions of chicks, and there usually are, but they are as scared and stupid as you are, so nobody gets a tumble. But this trip I did. Girl named Diane, blond, sweet, lovely girl named Diane. I remember we danced and danced to two pop songs that summer, ah, 'Love is a Many Splendored Thing,' and something called, let's see, yeah, 'Gumdrop.' Danced like we were made for each other and all that shit. My first taste of summer love and, man, I was dizzy and stupid with it. I got such a hard-on just dancing with her, nuzzling her cheek, that I thought I'd blow up or something. Long, thick, curly blond hair…"

"Back in the days when broads had curly hair?"

"… Yeah, a thousand years ago. It was kind of like custard, I guess. You know, thick and creamy and looped and it shook when she moved her head. I was in love, man.

"But then it was time to go home. I stayed over when the guys I was with left. I slept in the bushes, bathed in the lake, collected pop bottles, and mooched meals off everybody I met, and all this time I had a pint of Four Roses burning a hole in my AWOL bag, saving it for my last night, the ace up my sleeve. And all this time I never heard her talking about this guy Smokey from home. Then he showed up, a big guy, home from the service, driving a '32 Ford rod and wearing combat boots with his Levi's. There went old Joe Morning, shot out of the saddle before he gets his foot in the stirrup. Jesus Christ, you know, she even introduced me to him. Told him I was the nice kid that had been dancing with her – she didn't say anything about wrestling in the bushes though, and he was so damned big, I didn't really mind. So he thanked me, said I was a good kid, then they cut out for a beer joint outside the park, The Rendezvous, a den of lust and drunkenness where they did the dirty bop.

"So much for Diane. But I still had the pint and was still as horny as an old goat. So I began a new campaign, fought a single skirmish – saw a girl who looked vaguely familiar, asked her to dance, she said no; I remembered, she had said no the year before too – then I dashed down to where I had the bag stashed and sat down by the lake in some goddamned Doris Day moonlight, drinking, feeling sorry for myself, listening to the music and laughter from up at the pavilion. I got half a pint down, more than enough, lit a cigarette, stumbled, giggled, and walked – walked hell, strode, man – back up that hill. Ten fucking feet tall, man, fulla piss and vinegar. Boy, it was great. I can't forget it. Somehow I could feel the whole earth through my loafers. You know how you always feel sort of apart from the works, sort of a piece of a puzzle packed in the wrong box, like maybe the whole world is playing a joke on you, laughing at you? Well, I didn't feel that way any more. I wasn't just me any more, I was part of the lake and the moon and the grass growing under my feet, part of the hill tilting up toward the stars, and most of all part of that dancing and lights and music up above; and the lights were brighter, the music louder and wilder, and me itching to be scratched all over. I guess you might say I was cool for the first time in my life.

"Shit, I went back to that chickie who had turned me off two years in a row and I didn't ask this time, I told her, and grabbed her and danced off before she could say no. She couldn't say no all night; 'course I lied a lot, told her I was bumming around the States on my way to Mexico where I played the guitar in a whorehouse. The pint worked; I just didn't understand that you were supposed to drink it; I thought the girl was supposed to drink it. Love struck again. She followed me around for days, buying my meals, pestering me with hungry hands until I finally had to sneak off from her to hitch home.

"That's the way it usually is. Being drunk is good for me. Give me a pinball machine sober and I'll tilt every time, but drunk I'm lights and cold steel balls and action. A car, the same thing. Conversation: I talk better, know more what I'm saying. I'm all together, I belong. Like now…" He paused. "… Yeah, like now." He remained still for a while, holding his tongue like a man who has just realized what he has said. I tried another cigarette that lit, and we cupped it in our hands like a jewel till it was a butt, then lit another from it. Leaden swirls of smoke surrounded us, cold and damp as the air. Morning hunched over the cigarette, wrapped in his blanket like a Comanch' medicine man, his face in the flow a gaunt amulet worn by his soul, portentously warding off vague evil, clear virtue. I lay back against the sallow cement, my face swathed in gray mist and smoke.

"Yeah, it's wonderful to be drunk that way. Great," he said. "But then there is the other kind, like tonight. Just like a storm or something.

"The first one came in high school. My senior year, I think. Yeah, the Sunday after we had lost the state football championship. One of my more brilliant games; I ran seventy-five yards in the last minute of the game, then dropped the damned ball on the three-yard line, nobody around, I just dropped the damned ball, so we lost 10-7. The football team was drowning our sorrow, those of us who drank, in a wood outside town. Somebody had brought two kegs – more beer than we could drink in a year – in back of a pickup, and by dark I was really wiped out. I'd puked all over my clothes, had a fist fight with my best friend, and passed out twice. Before dark, mind you. A social drunk, you know.

"Then some little white-trash girls showed up. Two fat ones who were the local punches, gang-bang Southern belles, and a little skinny one who wanted to be. They got the fat ones drunk, then they got the skinny one drunk and naked in the back of the pickup where she was going to make her social debut on some old mattress ticking while everybody watched. But, you know, she drew the line there; no watching, she said. That's about the last thing I remember: her sitting in the back of that pickup, both hands up tight against her crotch, little-bitty-bird titties pinched between bony arms, crooning, 'un-uh, un-uh, un-uh,' like a little kid who's fixing to get whipped.

"After that I sort of lost things, blacked out I guess, but didn't pass out. But the others told me about it, told me what I did, what happened. Like tonight. I won't find out till you tell me. Anyway everybody argued with her about watching. You know how drunks get one thing in mind and the rest of the world can go to hell. We argued with her till dark and somebody built a bonfire, but she kept shaking her head, hiding her face in her stringy hair. Finally they gave up, and everybody except the guy who was first walked off down the road, then ran back and hid in the bushes next to the pickup. The first guy, a real cockhound lover boy, couldn't get a hard-on. He just stood there in the firelight, banging on his pecker and cussing and – by God, I just remembered her name, Rita Whitehead – Rita kept saying 'what's wrong, what's wrong' and he kept saying 'shut up, shut up.' You couldn't see Rita except for one naked foot up over the side of the pickup bed with one of those dime-store ankle chains and a little green track underneath it where the plate had come off and tiny, chipped, painted toenails. We laughed lover boy out of the scene. What the hell was his name? Dick something, Wilber, Willard, something like that. Then two big cherry farm boys, brothers, were next, but they both blew their rocks before they even got in, and remained cherries.

"The next guy said he didn't have time because his mother expected him to go to Training Union down at the Baptist Church with her. So it looked like that little ole gal wasn't ever going to get screwed. Then up steps old Joseph Savior Morning, screaming drunk, ripping off his pants out of turn, promising that poor white-trash girl some real welfare meat and potatoes. I, also somewhat of a lover, tried to warm her up with my hand, warm her up for a gang-bang, shit, but she was so drunk it didn't matter, so I went ahead without her. Till she started puking. I'd poke her, and she'd puke, like poking a sack of chicken feed with a hole in the other end. She wouldn't quit, so I got mad, they told me, and got off. Then I saw the blood. It covered me from belly to knees, all over my hands. Everybody was laughing and I thought they had played a joke on me, but then I tore the rest of my clothes off, and started washing off the blood with beer and throwing handfuls on her and shouting verses from Leviticus that I just happened to know, 'And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And everything that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: everything also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.' And then, they said, I shouted the last verse and held her head under the spout, 'And if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and the bed whereon he lieth shall be unclean!' Well, dad, I was well-flowered, to say the least, twice drunk, and everybody else sort of went insane with me, throwing beer on each other and everything." He paused – to think? to remember?

In the short quiet I noticed that the rain had stopped. Morning sat now arms about his knees, the blanket draped over his head, light from a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth exposing half a face perhaps as thin and tired in the shadow as Rita's must have been, trapped in the back of a pickup with a madman. Darkness hid the other half of his face, as if he were a leper hiding his sores from the Lord thy God. He went on in a slow, measured voice.

"We tied Rita naked to a sour persimmon tree next to the fire and danced and screamed and laughed – everyone joined me, no one tried to stop me – and washed away her blood with beer and rough hands. But I didn't stop there, they tell me, but grabbed the fat girls and had them stripped, shouting like a nigger preacher because they were wearing slacks, The man shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a woman, neither shall a woman put on a man's clothes: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God!'

"Deuteronomy 22:5," he said to me with a sad smile. "I always remember the good parts.

"Then somehow all of us were naked and washing the girls and slapping the fat girls' titties and rubbing them until they cried. Then my best friend, the one I'd already fought with, tried to screw one of the fat girls standing up. Somehow in the back of my mind I must have remembered that he had lost a nut when he was a baby. He had told me not to tell anybody; he was afraid we would laugh at him. Yes, count on me, I probably said to him. We tied him to the tree with the other sinners to the tune of Deuteronomy 23:1, 'He that is wounded in his stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.' A photographic memory, a miracle my teachers called it. He wasn't as easy to hog-tie as the girls, but nine of us managed.

"I woke a couple of hours later when it started to rain, and in the flickering firelight saw – well, let me say, real abominations. Seven kinds of sodomy at once. The scene made my stereo cabinet look like a Victorian play by comparison. The farm brothers had finally lost their cherry, in a way, and my best friend also lost any illusions he might have had about clean, healthy American farm boys. I untied him from the back of the pickup where they had carried him, and he and I fought again, and I let him whip me. But it didn't help. He always acted as if I'd done it instead of the farmers. Anyway, he never spoke to me again.

"It might make a good story to say that he killed himself or ran away or something, but right now he's selling insurance in Charleston, and if you asked him about that night, he wouldn't remember, either.

"Somehow we all got home without permanent damage, but it took a long time for me to believe what they said I'd done. I tried to ask Rita for a date, as a way of apology, but she told me to go fuck myself, '… or maybe your best buddy, huh?' God, what a night. Too much. And half a dozen times just like that since then." He stopped, shook his head, then rested it on his arms.

"You never remember anything?"

He looked up at me quickly, almost as if he were disgusted with even the idea, but then laid his forehead back down, mumbling something.

"What?"

"I said, 'Of course, I remember,' you asshole."

"Yeah," I said.

"Everytime. Shit, I remember even better drunk than sober. Remember everything. I just can't stop myself, at all. Just like that night. I remember those delicious fat titties, wet and stinking of beer. I wallowed in flesh, then whetted myself on bone, bony thin Rita, and I saw what those dumb farmers were doing to Jack. And I cheered them on. I knew what I was doing, but I just couldn't stop. I guess I didn't even want to stop. And then I always lied that I didn't remember. Ashamed, I guess. Like tonight. Shit," he said, "I don't know what's wrong with me." He seemed near tears. I didn't want to see him cry.

"Don't you know that's what being drunk is, Joe?" I said. "Don't you know?"

"What?" he said, half angry, perhaps at the simple answer.

"To be drunk is to be out of control. Sometimes the good part of a man gets out of the cage, sometimes the bad, man. Didn't you know that?" I tried to explain, to sooth, but he was too long convinced of his guilt, irrevocable guilt. Though we talked till daylight, gray morning, mist, and fog; I could still see the sadness deep in his dull, red-cracked eyes. Understanding, slow yet as sure as the sun slaying the mist, crept heavily into me… and I resolved, in spite of himself, in spite of myself, to save him.

I fell to conniving that morning. First I tried Tetrick.

"No," he said, when I asked him to speak to Dottlinger again about Morning's discharge. "No. And don't you. After that stunt the other night, after last night – yeah, I heard about last night – he's hanging himself."

"Maybe that's why we should help?"

"I've got seventy-five other men to help, men who don't give me trouble all the time. You got nine other men, and Morning is going to get his shit on them one of these times. I'm sorry that he has to go this way, but I'm not sorry to see him go. He's been trouble from the beginning. The first night he's in the Company, I go to Town and find him in Esting's, and he smiles at me and says 'Hi, sarge,' as if I hadn't told him that same morning that he couldn't go to Town for fifteen days. I still haven't found out how he got off base. Even I spent fifteen days on base before I got a pass. But not him. Rules are for other guys, not him. I won't miss him. Neither will you. He's already got you in crap once. He'll do it again. He's not worth the effort; he'll turn on you. He's not." Tetrick punctuated his "he's not's" by slapping his bald head and stomping his feet under the desk. "Ahh," he groaned. "This damned rain is killing my feet."

"Maybe I'll just walk in and kick Dottlinger's head in."

"Don't make troubles for me. I don't need them. Sgt. Reid didn't show up for work again this morning. Twice this week already. Once more and I'll have the Operations officers down here bitching at me again."

"I can't let it sit. I've got to do something. It's all wrong."

"Now you're talking like him. Leave it alone. Don't make waves for yourself. He's not worth it."

"Maybe not."

"What?"

"Nothing. Nothing. See you."

I left with, as the saying goes, a germ of an idea, though it turned out to be a disease, a plague on both our houses.

It cost me thirty dollars (because I didn't have ten cartons of Salems, fastest moving menthol cigarette on the black market) and a whole tired afternoon listening to Dominic stomp his peg leg against the Plaza bar to make points about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. He told a fair account of the coming of the revolution to his small town: guardia civil executed kneeling against a wall, Fascists clubbed and beaten over a cliff by a mob of drunks, a priest reaped with sickles. But I'd heard it before. I paid the price and in return received a solemn beery pledge from Dominic, on his honor and faith as a stout member of the revolution, on the soul of his leg buried in a nameless Spanish grave, that he would take prompt, decisive action, and send the evidence by way of my houseboy.

I heard nothing for a week. Morning stayed away from me, and when work forced us together, he avoided talk, feeling, I assume, that he had talked too much already. He was odd that way. He had a compulsive need to confess, and often expounded on the need for complete honesty in human relations, love, friendship, etc., but after the kind of confidence which he claimed drew people closer, he always drew away again. But finally the manila envelope appeared crinkling under my pillow, and I quickly spilled the 8x10s on my bunk, half in fear, half in excitement.

There they were: Sgt. Reid and his skinny wife in their bed. Damn Dominic's fumbling one-legged idiot soul. Reid looked as he always looked, as if he didn't exactly know what was happening. His wife seemed to know precisely what was going on, but she was looking at her husband, her head cocked like a setter bitch, as if wondering, trying to remember who she had climbed into bed with this time, or perhaps wondering what her husband was doing in her bed. She had a sullen, sly face in the glossy print. A thin, pouting face probably a great deal like the face of Morning's Rita Whitehead. A thin Scotch-Irish build, a bony small frame so common in the South (as if poverty had its own special gene), hair tangled in rats' nests, small breasts with long, almost stringy nipples – I didn't see what Dottlinger quite saw in her but, of course, nor did I understand what she saw in that bastard; except perhaps a congenital attraction to bastards.

The three other pictures exhibited a bit more diligence and imagination on Dominic's part. It made me sick. Dottlinger and Reid's wife were chemically locked in that most compromising of love's positions, known in the idiom as 69. I'd seen blue movies, stag films, before, but always drunk, and now I knew why. Love is private, and whatever its motives or methods, it deserves that privacy. The thought of how confused and dazed Reid must have been, caught in his own bed by blackmailers, was bad enough, but Dottlinger's exposure somehow touched a more tender wound. I marveled that he had both the imagination and guts to love a woman that way (for it does take imagination and guts for a Southern boy: the term "cock-sucker," certainly a vile implication across America, in the South refers not to fellatio, but cunnilingus, linguistically). Then the terrible thought came: what if they really were in love, star-crossed lovers? and Dominic intruding with a dirty foot, my man against love? Party myself to accidental evil, I almost threw the photographs away. I did tear Reid's candid shot and the negative into bits, but I was a blackmailer with a mission and, saying "The greatest good for the greatest number," I was on my way, telling myself, as one must in this sort of affair, "Don't force the rat into a corner; leave him room to negotiate." I thought I might begin by asking for his resignation in exchange for the negatives, and work from there… But then I laughed, a smothered giggle, a belch, then a roar. I stumbled back to my room and, laughing harder than I had in months, burned the prints and the negatives and the manila envelope. (I must admit that I took another look at the pictures which, as I remember, I laughed at tenderly, delightedly.) Fire and laughter and a bit of madness saved me from being both fool and martyr (and Morning).

I went to the Provost Marshal's Office and found a smart Dartmouth lawyer serving his time with a wry smile and a wonderful ability to beat courts-martial. I explained, with some slight exaggeration, Morning's plight, and within the hour he had called Dottlinger, quoted some legal, Latin nonsense to him (I think I overheard Illegitimi Non Carborundum; I hope so), and Dottlinger dropped the whole idea the same day. (Morning I saved, but incidentally loosed two more idiots on the world. One later made it to Leavenworth anyway, but the other went straight. Two out of three will get a fellow out of the Sally League any season.) Morning acted his part with mock sadness, I with mock humility; but he spoke to me again.

Football practice began the next week, Capt. Saunders came back the next, and we slogged on through the tail end of the rainy season, crazy about down-field blocks, gang-tackling, and mud.

It all seems important now, and there was so much more… a great football season, an undefeated team with Morning at quarterback and me running the defense, backing the line. A really fine season, a wonderful time, but I'm not sure what it might mean to you. Our last game – we had won the base championship the game before – we were quite drunk. Morning's passes faltered and tumbled like wounded ducks, and my defensive signals were at best unintelligible and more often confusing. During the last quarter we alternated between an eleven-man line and an eleven-man secondary. When first presented with an eleven-man secondary, the opposing quarterback left the field in disgust. But none of it mattered. Receivers – stretcher-bearers, I assume – appeared under Morning's sick passes; there was little need for defense since the other team not only couldn't hold the ball, they couldn't walk. The disgusted quarterback tripped on his way off the field; his receivers dropped seven passes in the end zone in the first half. And we couldn't do a thing wrong. Even I scored a touchdown on a two-yard plunge that Morning arranged for me. It was my first and really a thrill, except that I plunged through the end zone into the goal posts which shattered my shoulder pads and fractured my collar bone.

So I spent New Year's Eve 1962 in Baguio in a cast. I should have never let Morning call that play. I had to drink left-handed. Morning found a bar, The New Hollywood Star Bar. It was a real place because there was no icebox for the beer, no one put money in the jukebox but lifted the face and punched the songs they wanted, and the other patrons were Communists, students, and gold-miners, representing the labor and radical wings of the party. Morning played Trotsky to their Stalin and Mao, and they loved it. No one spoke to me because Morning told them I was a major when I was gone to the latrine the first night. Morning also fell in love at The New Hollywood Star Bar. The girl was real too, a short, stocky Benguet girl; young, pleasantly plump, with a square face and square hands and fingers, and best of all (as Morning told me seventy-two times that night) dirty fingernails. He had visions of sleeping with her in a tiny nipa hut, surrounded by jungle, washed by rain, devoured by her muscular body. But she wouldn't go the first night, and on the second she had cleaned her fingernails and wanted lady's drinks and a trip to the Club on John Hay. The first night she drank beer from heavy glasses, drank like a man with dirty fingernails. The second night he argued louder and longer with the Communists, and I had visions of fighting our way out, but nothing came of it. Later, in our room at the Club over a bottle of Dewar's he insisted that I tell him about my wife. Insisted in that drunken, persistent, arrogant way he had; his fist clenched except for the forefinger, which he held up with his thumb. "You need to talk about it, Krummel. You need to." He kept it up until I threatened to bust him even with one arm tied around me. He believed me, though, and let it go. But the next day he blew up at Cagle (who was a hell-and-back-again better golfer) on the golf course, and Cagle took after him with a four wood. Morning was stunned for a second, but then leapt down the fairway, Cagle two steps behind, and Novotny two steps behind him, leaving me collapsed in laughter on the tee and three very amazed caddies watching it all. Novotny caught Cagle and disarmed him, and while he sat on him, Morning apologized so contritely, so humbly that Cagle began to laugh, and when they came back up the fairway we were together again. They finished the eighteen holes in the rain as I tried to keep my cast from getting wet, all of us convinced that we were the four greatest guys alive. Then we feasted on two-inch thick sirloins, and drank cognac in our room until we were disgustingly maudlin, stupidly drunk, and God-ever-so happy; blind drunk and lost. We stood at the edge of the bluff in front of the Club in a windy, wet night, staring at the lights far down in the valley, looking up at the clouds so close. Wet and in the wind we were almost cold, chilled for the first time in months, and we savored it, warmed ourselves with cognac; but already in the wind, in the waning rain, came word of the long, hot dry season, a hint of dust, a touch of fear.

There is so much to tell, so much…