One to Count Cadence (24 page)

The Trick rented the largest of the nipa huts on the beach and I, childishly, took a smaller hut near it. I wanted to stay away from Morning. The bus drove the couple hundred yards to the hut, but most of the guys walked. I stayed behind to have one of the boiled crabs Morning had talked so much about.

The pavilion overlooked a tidal slough fed through an ankle-deep cut to the estuary. Across the tepid water ten nipa huts dotted the scrub grass at the edge of the beach. The largest hut was the last one on the right, and mine next to it, separated from the water by one hundred yards of the loveliest beach in the world. Its shining white arms stretched open in an embrace of the flat, shimmering sea from the mountains distant and hazy on the right, then left across the estuary to that wavering point where sea, sky and sand fused into invisibility. The pale hot colors, the faintest whisper of a breeze on my face — surely it must be a miracle, I thought. Voices came, faint and silly in the heat, playground sounds lilting from some past.

Quinn, child of bricks and alleys, had taken off his shoes and danced about the hot, packed sand, chasing a small gaggle of domestic geese at the edge of the slough. Pete, remembering his grandfather’s farm over in Michigan, shouted a belated warning to him. The gander had already snaked out his long gray neck along the sand, spread his wings high and wide behind his head, and was racing toward a laughing Quinn. Quinn jumped and grabbed one leg as the hard red bill whacked against his ankle bone. While he tottered, rubbing his ankle, the gander retreated slightly, regrouped, and charged again. Quinn tried to lift the other foot and, in drunken amazement, fell down, his open mouth lost for the sound of laughter not his own. Pete shooed the gander away with a stick which he then had to take away from Quinn who was shouting something about killing that goddamned bird.

The gander, noble fellow that he must have been, ignored his fallen enemy with a champion’s poise, puffed out his magnificent breast as if to receive a medal, and with a measured, heroic step herded his maidens in the opposite direction.

The next day Quinn loudly claimed that those bruised lumps on his ankles were from the bus ride and that he hadn’t been looking for brickbats at all but for his cigarettes. But his protests served him not at all; he quickly became “Goose-killer, son of Goose-egg.” The name would fade into the night of half-remembered much-embellished war stories told to the folks back home, when it would be revived as anything from “Father Goose” to “The Great Gray Goose.” The spirit of the nickname would survive even that distant future when graying heads would be scratched in search of “that crazy guy’s name that got bit by a goose.”

Watching Quinn and Pete walk away, I constructed the legend while waiting for my crab, rolling the cold beer bottle across my forehead, watching the small fishing dugouts slide over the glassy sea.

John brought my crab shortly after the field had cleared. I explained that I had never eaten crab before, and asked if he would show me how to break it open. He seemed oddly pleased. I supposed it was good as crabs go, but like a man it carried its skeleton on the outside, and resisted my prying attempts beyond death. I finished clawing, paid a sullen Billy Boy whose mascara had run in the heat, and sauntered to the bus. I picked up my gear, the book Morning had recommended, and a basket of beer. Then, as I said to myself, I, lord of the manor, retired to my chambers peacefully content to dream of past victories and future conquests, not at all sorry I hadn’t bunked with the others.

* * *

Morning woke me at the very hottest part of the afternoon.

“Hey, animal, you want to take a swim?”

My neck and shoulders were slimey with sweat and the bed was wet underneath them. I poured the half-finished beer through the gaps in the bamboo-strip floor, shut the novel without marking the three pages I had read, stretched slightly, and started sweating again.

“Too hot, jack.”

He waved two coolie hats and two wine bottles with the straw bases cut off and explained that we were going swimming because it was too hot. After a bit I realized that he was trying to apologize, so I rolled off the lumpy mattress and swapped my shorts for a swimsuit while Morning hummed “Meadowlands.” I followed him into the sun which filled the sky like a malevolent overcast above the pristine reflector of the sand. The water, a pale even blue, seemed flattened by the heat, compressed into a level sheet of glare marked only by slight irregular swells which died half-noticed against the baked finger of sand like faint pulses. Morning and I joined the others and sat neck deep in the water, cooled in it, shaded by our hats and anchored by the wine bottles tied to our wrists. As the heat of the day continued and the wine expired we drifted around the point into the estuary as the panting tide came in like a tired runner. In spite of our elaborate defenses, within the hour our bodies resembled water-logged bread crusts dipped in wine. Novotny, Morning and I sought the mottled shade of a fishing village up the river.

We found a bit of shade under the village pavilion where a wedding reception was in progress. The Filipinos had seen us walking past, called to us and, laughing and patting our sun-tendered shoulders, invited us in for a beer. We should have felt foolish attending a wedding reception in swim trunks, but their greeting was so warm, so unpatronizing, we felt truly welcome. It has been a long time since any stranger had a friendly word for us, and these short, happy people embarrassed us with their warmth. Beer and sweet greasy roast pig and purple rice and fried chicken were pressed upon us with champagne smiles. They were humbly polite, turning down the rented jukebox to introduce us to the milling crowd, but also shared their laughter with us, even at us in that fine way old friends have. An old withered man kidded me about my beer belly which had grown like a tumor since football season, and I returned the favor with a motion at his egg-bald head. His face disappeared into a mask of wrinkles, and a happy cackle flew from his toothless mouth. I shook hands with the now joined families, then with the slight, handsome groom and his shy bride who hid her smile with a dip of her head. I sailed once more into the tumbling maze of people. Each way I turned, smiles bloomed like flowers photographed in time-lapse; brown buds of faces burst into blossoms under the sun. I spoke with a man who claimed to know all about Texas, about cowboys and Indians, and when I told him that I was both a cowboy and an Indian, he laughed and laughed until tears rimmed his eyes. I didn’t know what was so funny but I too laughed, even harder than he, so hard I abruptly sat down, and he wailed off again into breathless mirth. We ended both sitting and giggling and holding each others shoulders until the last seizure passed, then smiled and parted.

I rested at a table, sitting next to a white-headed Filipino. He looked to be fifty or so, but his hair was full and bushy, his face firm and his body held in a vigorous, controlled strength. He wore a starched light-blue pin-striped shirt like I remembered my father wearing before the war, and a dark-blue pair of trousers which obviously belonged to a double-breasted suit; but his shoes were brand new, a stiff almost metallic brown, and he had sat them on the bench next to him as if displayed for sale or trade. His dusty calloused feet, broadened and toughened by too many barefoot years to count, splayed across the packed dirt under the table. He nodded politely, but neither smiled nor spoke. He mixed a drink: one part Black Dog Gin, one part orange soda-water and one part beer poured into a thick water tumbler. He drank hunched over the glass, slowly, like a man on a long road between drinks. I watched him and his ugly feet which clawed the earth like stubborn toads, then finished my beer and walked away.

In ten minutes I was back, sitting across from him, smiling and inquiring, “How are you today, sir?” He had moved his shoes on to the table.

“Fine, thank you,” he said, looking up. The voice was as worn and rough as the skin of his feet. “You are in the Army?” he asked. His tone was soft and deep and weary, his English exact.

“Yes, sir.”

“That is good. I, too, was once in the army,” he said, staring back into his glass as if time were telescoped there. “A very long time ago, during the war. The Japanese took my sawmill and I went to the hills to fight with Colonel Fergit on Mindanao. I was a major.”

I wasn’t surprised: I hadn’t yet met a Filipino male born before the war who did not claim to be a guerrilla. (But no one had even heard of the Hukbalahap rebellion of the fifties.) A restaurant owner in Angeles, a woman, had told me, “They all lie. They hide in the hills and call it fighting. They should be a woman and learn about fighting.”

The old man pulled a battered wallet from his pocket and showed me a picture of himself, three other Filipino officers, and General Douglas MacArthur. Other bits of tattered paper were taken from the leather sheath: his college diploma, folded and faded, showing his degree in civil engineering; pictures of the wife and children killed by the Japanese in ‘43, and his sawmill, and part of his outfit; his commission and various citations; a membership in an engineering society, dated June 2, 1936; a smudged dollar bill with the fuzzy red ink signatures of all the Americans in the band; a barely recognizable snapshot of Betty Grable’s ass. He laid his very life out before me, faded, flaked at the edges, torn in the creases, scattered like wasted time around his new shoes. In a voice as ragged as the edge of a shell-ripped jungle, quiet from too much whispering, he explained how he had been cheated of his pay for the five years of fighting, shorn by crooked politicians and apathetic Americans. He told me, an American, but the blame and bitterness held a very dull, chipped edge in his voice.

“Ah,” he sighed. “So long ago. So very long ago.”

We both understood that he had just told me that he was a Huk, a member of one of the few remaining small bands of roving bandits who operated with little or no pretense of any political means or end to their banditry. I wondered if he had been on the raid the night before, wondered if those were his comrades we had killed.

He stowed the captured fragments of time in the wallet, then exposed his right calf. A mottled stitching of a machine gun wound scarred the leg. An old, smooth scar reflecting the unforgotten pain, pain compounded in nearly twenty years of running and fighting and dying after it was supposed to be (it had to be!) over. I remembered the blasted body of the night before, thought of wounds never healed to scar.

He and I talked until dusk, even smiled twice more together, then gravely shook hands as if over the coffin of a common friend. He tucked his gleaming shoes under his arm and walked toward the mountains in the sunset, his white hair waving like a flag of a forgotten truce in the strengthening breeze off the sea, and tiny mushrooms of dust puffed between his misshapen toes.

* * *

That night and the next day swept past like the waters of a rapids; our pleasure and peace leaping and laughing over any discontented rocks we might have brought to the beach. Once a fierce yellow sunset drifted into a delicate green, lime-aired dusk. The gentle surf crested in the quick darkness with swirling phosphorous fringes of tiny animals like liquid silver. Under the black water the shining protozoa loomed like little lights into our eyes, then curved away like speeding cars. Long careless daylight hours were spent watching the chameleon in the thatch of my roof, and he observing me with the same lazy indifference. I slept once in the window-box at the large hut, too drunk to walk, peaceful among the deep sleeping noises, the shimmering ribbons of light reflected on the slough. From the pavilion across the way laughter and the ingratiating whine of the jukebox wound over the dead water as Quinn, Morning, Haddad and some of the others danced drunkenly with the Billy Boys until fat John turned out the lights. A mosquito buzzed me, but a breeze off the gulf chased him inland. I must have slept through a shower, for when morning came my clothes were damp. I swam in the sunrise, disturbing for a second the still, perfect sleep of the sea, then washed from a sand well, and breakfasted on coconut and raw fish, and watched the sun creep like a sly snail up the early morning blue. I wondered aloud why anyone would ever leave this place.

That night we took the bus into town and went to a whore house.

* * *

It was a tall, nearly three-story shell of mud and straw bricks. The whitewash had peeled away like scabs to expose older and more flaky coats. The ground floor was open and cluttered with the usual assortment of cracked tables, bamboo chairs, bar, and bubbling jukebox. Over the back half of the room a jumbled maze of bamboo rooms climbed all over each other toward the roof. The small cubicles were stacked in a random association, each seeming to have no relation to any other, nor as a whole any connection with the outside walls. Halls and stairs and landings went off at every angle as if an abstract expressionist had decided to become a carpenter. A drunk might wander up there until he was sober and still be lost, passed from giggling whore to giggling whore forever.

The girls who stood up when we arrived were of a very provincial sort, either indecently young moving up in the bonded hierarchy of whoredom, or absurdly old, having fallen to the last layer. The Trick, except for Morning and I (he because of his peculiar brand of romantic puritanism or puritanical romanticism, and I because of my… rank?), didn’t seem to mind and fell to seducing them in wholesale lots. Cagle sat on the lap of the largest professional in the whole PI, and acted like a ventriloquist’s dummy to her great pleasure. Morning and I drifted to the rear where a solitary woman was shuffling a deck of cards under a bare light bulb. It was still early and there were no Filipino customers in the place.

“Okay, man,” Morning said, “that’s for this one.”

“Don’t be in such a rush. Your old sarge may have something to say about that, young trooper. That’s your problem, kid, too big a hurry.” He laughed and walked up to the table.

She had the delicate features — the thin, well-bridged nose, small curved lips — which spoke of some Spanish blood, but her body was squat, full and still firmly stacked in spite of the twenty-nine or thirty years of use. She would be shorter when she stood up than we had thought her to be. She wore no make-up and dressed in a simple black jersey and slacks and no shoes.