One to Count Cadence (23 page)

“Fuck. There never was any sense in it. War is stupid. The most terrible thing man can do to himself,” Morning said, leaning up.

“I don’t know about that. A little war every now and again seems to put a bit of backbone in a people. They can’t function as a people except during a war, and even if it’s only a little bit more than usual, it is more.”

“Man,” Franklin laughed, “that’s all you lifers do — wait for a war.” A general chuckle followed.

“So what’s a soldier for? To paint shitcans and file reports? All of you know how you hate being that kind of menial…”

“Maybe we’d hate being murderers too,” Morning interrupted. “Anything is better than being a hired killer, anything, and that’s all a soldier is. It seems to me,” he continued, pinching air between his forefinger and thumb and shaking it at me, “that soldiers are nothing but dumb shits who don’t know how to enjoy life so all they can dream of is a glorious Viking death. Whatever they’ve done or not done in their whole damned lives is okay if they die fighting. My God, Krummel, you’ve seen them; unhappy turds, either drunks or religious fanatics, waiting for a war. And if they had the chance and the power, they’d have one too. And someday when America goes Fascist, they’ll have their war, and burn 70 million American Negroes when they start losing. Soldiers, ha, frustrated boy scouts and latent homosexuals.”

“If they are, Morning, it’s only because guys like you have made them that way with your believing in things, in thinking that men should fight not for power or money or lust but for ideas or gods which are the same thing. War is the human condition. It’s natural for a man to want more than is his, and when he wants it badly enough, he’ll kill to get it. That seems to me to be more sensible than fighting for ideas. People once recognized the warrior as the leader of his race, but now you think he must be a fool or a brute, and since it is you guys with your mouths open all the time, you even convince him that he is…”

“What other animal kills his own kind, but a foolish and brutal one?” Morning interrupted. Franklin started to make a joke, but stopped when he saw the anger in Morning’s face.

“Any one that finds his kind, even his brother, in his way, encroaching on his territory or trying to steal his food or mate. Except that animals don’t believe in right or wrong or unconditional surrender. Man’s supposedly — and people like you have done all you can to convince him of it — only a higher animal, so maybe his sensitivity to encroachment is more highly developed and he kills for other kinds of assumed offenses. I don’t know… there are a lot of things I don’t know that maybe I’d learn in a war. How many novelists find war to be the most perfectly defined moment in their lives? How…”

“How many find it the last moment of their lives?”

“People die in car wrecks.”

“I’m against them too.”

“Christ, Morning, man has always been obsessed with murder. Maybe it answers questions. Maybe the killing gives you something holy. Maybe you find out about God then.”

“It seems to me,” he said, shaking that pedantic finger and thumb again, “that
you’re
obsessed with murder. You got killing mixed up with screwing in that Puritan middle-class mind of yours.” He laughed harshly. “Man, it is wrong for one man to kill another man. Don’t you understand that.”

“Of course I don’t understand that. Everyone tells me its wrong, but they don’t tell me why.”

“Shit, it’s self-evident.”

“Bullshit, it’s self-evident. All my life I’ve read about the glories of killing. What about the millions of comic books and B-movies I ate up? Like every kid. Like every one of us. I learned that killing the enemy was a good and beautiful thing…”

“But those were…”

“You goddamned right they were lies. So three goddamned cheers. All men lie out of their ignorance, so how am I to choose between lies?”

“Like I was saying,” I eased out, “I learned that killing the bad guys was all right, even noble when it was done with honor and dignity. And then you people taught me that there are no bad guys, no black or white hats, just misguided gray ones. But you did it the wrong way — you made fun of the good guys instead of trying to make me understand the bad ones. You made fun of them, and since the Western idea of morality is totally without a sense of humor, you made me care more for the bad guys. You peddled the crap that a gangster was better than a snappy, wheeler-dealer preacher because the gangster was more honest. Okay, so tell me it’s wrong to kill another man?”

“Okay, mother-duck, I’ll tell you: It’s wrong for one man to kill another, and war is an evil fucking horrible thing!” He ended with a shout.

“Would you have killed Germans in the war?”

“Sure…”

“Because they believed evil things?” I asked.

“Sure… but I would have realized it was…”

“But now it’s America which believes the evil things?”

“That’s right.”

“But we believed in evil in the forties just as much as now, perhaps even more, but you would have killed the Germans rather than the Americans, then…”

“All right,” he shouted, “but I would have realized that it was wrong and done it like a painful duty, an awful but necessary job.”

“Jesus Christ, Morning, now it’s you who doesn’t care about man. You can’t kill men like it was a job. What an insult to the whole human race that would be. It has got to have romance, it has to be the completion of a love affair, and an act of love, not a duty.” I opened my arms and lowered my voice. “It isn’t just ‘Wine, Women and Song’ men lust after, it’s war too, by God! And until you damned moral Christian Romans came along, men had sense enough to have gods which enjoyed wine, war, women, and song along with us frail mortals. But now we’re civilized, Roman and Christian — even you atheists are Christian — a nation of shopkeepers, carpenters and librarians; slaves in the name of individual freedom. Shit! Death defines life…”

“Can’t you get it through your thick damned skull that war isn’t like you think it is going to be. It isn’t beautiful; it’s ugly, awful and ugly, and painful and cold and hungry. Man is for life not death!”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Okay, and I know it is the best thing in this miserable damned civilized world. It is a clean and simple thing, a fire that brands a man, and if it hurts it should, damnit, and men love it deep in their sinful hearts! Love it! And so do you, Joe Morning. You whine now, but you loved shooting at those poor little bastards last night.”

He stopped, took a hasty drink of beer. I’d stepped on his toes too hard, too hard. “You mean you love it,” he said, shaking that clutched finger and thumb again. “Mean, sick bastards like you.”

“I don’t know yet… but I’m going to find out. I’ve got to find out.”

“Oh, you poor crazy son of a bitch,” he said, then paused, sighed, and continued, “you really are crazy.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, ready to smile and forget.

“You bastards talk too much,” Novotny drawled.

“Don’t patronize me, you son of a bitch!” He stood up and flung his arms away from his body as if casting off a heavy cloak,

“Come on, forget it.”

“Fuck you!”

“That’s a pretty intolerant attitude for the great white Left,” I said.

“Boy, you play the big educated soldier, ancient tradition of intelligent warriors ready to defend man against his enemies, man, but when it comes right down to it, you’re nothing but a half-assed impotent brute looking for your balls on a battle field!”

“No, baby! My balls are right here, for better or worse,” I shouted, standing. “So why don’t you try to take a bite out of them, or shut your mouth before you piss me off!”

“That’s the way your kind of guy operates. If you can’t fight it or fuck it or drink it, it don’t make sense,” he said to my back as I walked up the aisle. “All you fucking madmen.”

“Whatever I am, I’m not a mental masturbator,” I tossed over my shoulder as I swayed on to the front of the bus, opening my beer.

* * *

The anger burned tight and hard in my stomach, pure and hot as it was before a fight. Morning would have fought me but would I have him? Telling myself that it was in the name of friendship but, as always, thinking myself a coward for backing away from the fight for whatever good reasons. If you ever worry about being a coward, you can never convince yourself that good reasons aren’t rationalizations to save inner face. A poker game started in the back of the bus like an embarrassed cough, and I guzzled my beer and ate my guts. Fear is the act of running away and bravery, that of running forward: they are not abstractions. Yes.

* * *

The bus passed through an area of jungle, dark, limitless foliage which marked our passage with a few stirred leaves like the splash of a castaway’s bottled message on some distant sea. Only a few villages huddled against the flicker of the highway in the vast wilderness, breaking the solid wall of trees.

I knew this country. Both the American and Japanese invasions had followed this route from the beaches on the Lingayen Gulf. The dense mass of green had long since consumed any sign of the invasions with its mad twirling vines. Even on the beach only the code name, Blue Beach, and an occasional rusted piece of unidentified metal hinted of the past violence. So time and the dumb growth healed the scars with the slightest of efforts, but that day, that burning day, the ghosts forever uncured spoke to me, summoned me to their bleeding sides. Did I hear a monkey’s cry, frail in the rushing wind? Or the endless scream of a man trapped under mortars exploding in the trees above — a shriek which echoed through the cave of time? The bus crashed over a bridge, and something flashed above the brown water. A bottle curving toward the creek? or a hand sucked down for the last time, the millionth last time, fingers arched not in a plea but in defiance still? I knew, I knew. The past, history, memory, had always waited for me like a specter. My memory never knew the chains of time. I had walked the peaceful grounds of Pittsburg’s Landing while ragged men fell at every step. I wandered under the shaded sun on Elkhorn Tavern as cannon spoke and cannon answered and men cried into stained faces. I stood motionless on the Upper Brazos as six Comanches took the hair of a farmer and his wife and child, then climbed calmly on their horses — all drunk, three bleeding, one dying from the farmer’s stand — riding back to the Staked Plains. Yes, I saw, and forever will see, the ghosts of men dying, and as I saw I understood, despite the protests of the fallen themselves, that it was heroic, was perhaps the last noble thing.

I wanted to shout it to an indifferent, cowardly world which had, in the name of Utopia, forgotten Valhalla. Or perhaps I only wanted to say it once to myself to be sure I still believed. But I remained silent in the clatter of the bus, thinking myself a fool, a dreamer whose visions were the nightmares of mankind; a fighter not for peace but for eternal war. But I could not stop: I had seen things I could not forget, and remembered things I had never seen. For me the two Siberian armies still stumbled across the snow as they encircled the Germans outside of Stalingrad. There had been no sound track on that film clip, but I had heard them cheer. Flat-faced Siberians ten thousand miles from home, fighting for Russians they didn’t like against Germans they didn’t know, because it was right for a man to die well, to stand and not run, to fight and perhaps die. But victory is not the only face of war. I also remembered the sad German faces — starving for weeks and freezing for longer — numb with capture, waiting to march further than they had meant to with 107,800 going, and waiting still longer for only six thousand to march back. But the losers did not really look that different from the victors as they marched away to more freezing and fighting and stinking and enduring. I saw and remembered, and God forgive me, thought it noblest of all.

But that was then, riding toward the sea, when I was ashamed of being a warrior.

* * *

I dozed fitfully into the city of Dagupan, thankful not to dream, but the bus stopped in the city so we could buy more beer and ice and fresh bread from a little bakery Morning knew. I had no need to leave the bus, so I waited in the heat, watching the town, the corrugated iron roofed, wooden buildings decked with soft drink signs; the people scuffing about in Jesus boots or wooden clogs, seemingly never entering the buildings. Almost all of the buildings were unpainted, but the wood — perhaps because of its own sturdy nature or the heavy, washing rains — refused to look untended. The skin of the people seemed to be the result of some inner brownness, as if their flesh might be earth colored and their bones as delicately hued as ancient ivory keys. There was the brown dust of dirt you find wherever men sweep it out of their houses, but it wasn’t filth. That came when the twentieth century god of progress managed to sell itself to the have-not’s as salvation, and as a result killed the best of the old society with its worst. If I had asked the teen-aged Filipino outside the bus window, the one with a transistor radio plugged to his head, “Is this progress? These things steal your dignity at the price of your pride.” He probably would have answered, “Yeah, man, yeah!” I didn’t ask him; and no one asked me.

The others came back from their errands, and we drove the five or six miles to the beach. The bus stopped in front of a large pavilion marked by a neat, freshly painted “JOHN’S,” surrounded by the graceful bows of coconut palms, and sitting on a slight rise above the beach and the estuary. Morning greeted the fat Filipino, obviously John, with a true lover-of-
real
-places familiarity. John, who I’m sure misread Hemingway too, returned the salutations like a true good fellow. John was a fat man who looked very uncomfortable being obese, as if remembering thinness and mourning its passing. He was also queer, and stocked the pavilion not only with a small café, sari-sari store, and a score of weathered tables, but seven or eight Billy Boys in partial drag. Morning introduced me as Sgt. Krummel, Trick Chief, so for the rest of our stay John called me Chief. But he was not nearly as bad as he sounds. His eyes did join his thin smile with some warmth, and refused to shake hands in deference to his sex, as if to say, “I have my boys!” He introduced his boys, Violet, Rose, Magnolia, etc. His place wasn’t as out of the way as Morning had led me to believe.