One to Count Cadence (19 page)

“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.”