One to Count Cadence (30 page)

“Oh, everyone is in such a hurry today. But it is late, and I, ah, shall we say, have a lady waiting. So to the point. If you had not made my two worthy sergeants quite so angry, we could arrange some sort of deal where I, ah, would purchase your cigarettes at a very small loss to you. You pay seven for them on Base, I would pay you seven. You would be out nothing but your profit and expenses, and be much the richer, as they say, for the experience. A very small loss, indeed,” he said, pausing to offer me a cigarette, which I didn’t take.

“A small loss?” I asked, “or a shakedown?”

“Oh, such a crude term. I would have expected more from an educated man,” he said, lighting his Chesterfield.

“Educated?” I said.

“Oh, yes, I know about you, Sgt. Krummel. I’ve known Teresita for many years. A lovely woman, as they say, yes, indeed. I’ve known about your business for some time. I also heard about your unfortunate encounter with Mr. Garcia this afternoon. He is a pig, but he could be dangerous, yes, indeed. As they say, I have my ear to many walls, yes, and you might call this a tax, a luxury tax. And the small loss you speak of so heavily would indeed be small compared to the price you would pay if you force me to call the U.S. Military Adjutant. You will surely face charges, be, as they say, busted, and perhaps spend some time in the stockade,” he said, finishing with a perfect smoke ring.

“But, as I said,” he quickly continued, “that was before you two boys made my men so unhappy, so damned unhappy. Now, unfortunately, it will take only a gesture for you and your friend. You must walk out, forgetting you ever saw these cigarettes. You have reserve, surely, and it will take all of this to, as they say, grease the angry palms around here.” There wasn’t a trace of irony or of threat in his voice, but a slight note of sadness; the director of one company hearing about the director of another falling into a bad but not disastrous deal.

“My friend said no deal, didn’t he?” I said.

“Unfortunately, yes. He’s such an emotional creature.” Another perfect smoky circle.

“Then no deal.”

“Don’t be foolish. You made a mistake dealing with such a, as you might say, small tomatoes for a drop.” He rustled in his desk for a moment, then handed me a card, and offered me another cigarette. I took this one. “My address and telephone number. I also deal slightly in the market. When you make a run after now, call me. If you can boost your load to three hundred cartons a week, guaranteed, I can raise the price to eleven and a half. You will get rich; I will get richer. But you have to take this small loss. The younger man has, as you might say, political connections. A small loss. You’ll make it up in a month.”

“Did you tell my friend this?” I asked, blowing a ragged ring of smoke between us.

“Yes,” he said, standing. As he walked around the desk the crease in his trousers lay as precise as a ruler edge, the shine on his expensive shoes, hard and brilliant. “And other things. Other things.”

“And he still said no?”

“Yes.”

“Then, no.”

He sighed, then said, “You must be very good friends, indeed. Money can’t buy friendship, as they say.” He made out a receipt for the cigarettes, “But I think this is going to be an expensive friendship for you.” He reached for the phone. “Good luck. Think about what they say, Money can’t buy friendship.”

“I guess not,” I said as I left, cuffed again. They walked me out and lodged me in the cell with Morning.

“He give you that get-rich-quick shit, too?” he asked out of the dark corner where he perched on a bamboo cot.

“Sure,” I said, sitting on the other after the two cops removed the cuffs. “I told him it was a great idea. Told him to go ahead.”

“Don’t try to shit me, Krummel. You told him to shove it right back up his crooked ass. Just like me.” His words seemed very close to my ear, but I still couldn’t see him; my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness. “Crooked mother.”

“Where do you get off being so damned moral?” I asked.

“What we’re doing is okay; what that bastard is doing is crooked. He’s supposed to be a cop. And so what if we do have to deal with shit, at least it knows it’s shit, like our lovely drop man, but that mother up there thinks he don’t stink. Where do I get off being so moral? Shit, man, where does he get off being so crooked. So I told him to shove it,” he said quickly, something, not fear, nor excitement, making his voice high and tired, almost a whine.

“And why? Why not take the loss?” I asked.

“Why? Because, man, I’ve been lied to, stolen from, and shit on for the last time. It’s too much. Nobody pushes me around any more, man,” he said.

“And how do you know I didn’t take the loss?” I asked.

“Nobody pushes you around either,” he said.

“No, I guess not,” I said. “Guess not.”

* * *

The adjutant had us out in an hour. In another half hour we sat with a bottle of black-market Dewar’s — bought with my money because Morning discovered his loss — in the hotel. I was very numb, but tired too, and the Scotch seemed to run to my legs and weaken them, divide the very cells holding the muscles together. It seemed I should feel more, something more, anger, rage, shame, something about the loss of Teresita and my stripes in the same day, but for now I was just tired. The rage mounted behind Morning’s unfocused eyes, but I was just tired.

(The night Ell left with Ron Flowers to go to his apartment, after Ron and I had argued about going to Mississippi for the summer project, and he had drawn the switchblade he had carried without using since he was ten, and I called him a nigger, then broke his arm, saying, “I will not be pushed”; after Ell left, saying, “You don’t need me. You always win. You just never lose. I can’t stand that,” and I crying to her back fleeing through the door, “But I thought that was what a man was for,” and my voice echoing in the empty hallway, “was for,” and the past tense striking me like a boot in the face, and the loneliness clawing in on quick feet, not just Ell gone, but the world gone from me, and I screamed into the empty hall again, “But, baby, I’m losing now. Goddamn, I’m losing, and the losers are winning, and goddamn, baby, I don’t know why,” and I cried for a bit while curious fools peeked through cracked and darkened doorways, then I sat in the living room all night, drinking; I was just too damned tired to move.)

I left the table once to pry open the window, to flee the conditioned air, but found only the stink of the sea’s dumb expanse, the growl of the streets, and a hot breath on my face as some tired mad hound raced toward me through the night.

“Money can’t buy friendship,” I said to the sweating dog.

* * *

After the first quart, we ordered another even though Morning was already as drunk as one man should be. He hadn’t stirred from the table, except to take a leak, and he drank straight from the bottle. I had been as still as he, after trying the window, and may even have been as drunk, but I was silent, counting the blossoms on the flowered wallpaper, while he constantly mumbled to himself, his whispers like bees in the room, his hands flying about his face. And when I wasn’t counting, I was just there. Sad and numb, the way it is when you catch a good one on the jaw and in that time between the fist and the darkness you float away from the world, consciousness unconnected, unanchored by pleasure or pain, just ether dissipating in the vacuum, tumbling through fire-streaked skies. But Morning’s voice, now loud, grasped me from the whirling peace, sat me back on earth:

“Hey, man, you know what that mother said?”

“Who? What? No,” I said, moving over to the bed, perhaps to feign sleep. I didn’t care what any mother said.

“That crooked fucker,” he grunted, “that head Dick Tracy.”

“No,” I said, my eyes closed, drifting.

“No, what?”

“No, I don’t know what he said, and I don’t much give a damn.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, he said that broad was a Billy Boy, the one at the house. What a bunch of shit.” He slapped the table.

“Huh?”

“The broad. The mother said she was a Billy Boy queer chomping on my root, man.” He hit the table top again.

“So what. Who gives a shit. Queer, smear. Go away.”

“I give a shit, that’s who,” he said, now hitting the table with his fist. “I give a shit. But it wasn’t.”

She had been a big broad, and could have been. I’d seen Billy Boys who looked more like women than men, and I wanted to go to sleep, so I said, “Could have been.”

I thought he was coming for me, which woke me up, but he just sat at the table, pounding it until I made him quit, shouting kill the mother-fucker until I quieted him with a weak drink from the second bottle, which the bellhop showed up with in the nick of time. He blubbered until I asked him what was wrong.

I asked; he took the rest of the night to tell me; I shouldn’t have asked.

I can only tell the story that Joe Morning told me. There might be some advantage in trying to re-create his voice, except that he was so drunk that night he seemed to have lost his voice, the voice I knew, the intelligent, articulate voice which he could usually maintain, which he had maintained on other nights even as he fell drunk to the floor. But not this night. He mumbled, coughed, laughed, perhaps even lied. His words ran in confused flight from his mouth, the truth pouring out of his head like wine from a broken pitcher. He told the story without any sort of order, repeating himself, skipping about in time, across place. Unless you knew him as I did, his story, told in his words, would only confuse you, so I’ve taken the historian’s liberty of retelling it as I know it. There are some disadvantages to this method, agreed; it would be easy to twist this method to my own purposes and, of course, there is some twisting always going on, but please accept it, as one accepts Gibbon on Rome, Carr on the Soviet Union, Prescott on the conquest of Mexico. Krummel on Joe Morning. As this is my truth, not
the
truth; take it with a grain of bitter salt in your beer.

* * *

He called himself Linda Charles, and Joe Morning first saw him (her?) in a nightclub in San Francisco. The other men performing in the show were professionally good, but obviously men, betrayed by a walk too exaggerated, a hand too strong, a wig as stiff as frosting on a mannequin’s head. But when Linda Charles walked out to sing, long blond hair, real hair instead of a wig, sweeping down and back across her white shoulders, slim, firm legs swinging beneath a simple green silk sheath, a voice in the club, dim behind Morning, said in drunken awe, “My God, that’s no man.” Linda Charles smiled a woman’s smile, enchanted with flattery, at the voice. Then she clapped her hands, stomped a delicate foot, and roared into a blues arrangement of “Saint James Infirmary” in a fine husky contralto. The green high heel behind her, her hands clasped in front, then a passionate shake of the head would send the blond hair out of her face in a shining ripple down across her round shoulders.

Morning felt a vague, guilty excitement heat the drinks in his belly, as probably did most of the men in the audience. The forbidden thing: taking on the trappings of woman, imitating the beauty of woman. And with the beauty, the forbidden wisdom, the possibility of being a receptacle for the seed, being the gift rather than the giver, possessing a firm lovely breast for your own, a slim silken leg which must ache with pleasure as it moves against its mate. Morning started to rise, but smart enough not to betray his fright, fearing the fear the fright might betray, he stayed through to the end.

But when he left, the perfume of fear followed him, and he took his already generalized guilt, too, and perhaps mistook the one for the other. He had been punished so much, he must be guilty of something. Perhaps this? Who knew?

* * *

During his junior year of college, Joe Morning had been sitting on a car fender in front of his fraternity house, drunk, watching, but not taking part in, a springtime panty raid on a nearby girls’ dorm. He could act the part of the amused observer because in his basement room in the frat house lay a drunk coed from the very dorm being raided, naked but for her loafers. Earlier in the evening he had, with his silver tongue and a pint of Southern Comfort, persuaded the girl to climb into his ground level window. And now, fresh fucked and smiling, he had come out to investigate the noise.

But when the police came to stop the raiders, which a single dorm mother with a Coke bottle had already done, and to stop the girls hanging out the second-story windows who were waving lace-fringed encouragement, they arrested everyone in sight, including the irate dorm mother who had assaulted an officer of the law on his way upstairs to stop those silly girls, and including innocent bystander, Joe Morning.

“Man, I’m not doing anything,” he said to the cop who tried to pull him off the car. “I been sitting here all the time.”

“Oh, sorry, boy; thought you was a girl-child, sitting there with all that hair,” the cop drawled as he stepped back. “Let’s go.”

“Fuck off, peckerwood. I haven’t done a thing.”

“You just did,” the cop said as Morning tried to jerk away. He skillfully stabbed him in the stomach with his billy, slid him off the hood, twisted an arm behind, and guided him to the wagon. At the steps Morning struggled slightly, more to get his breath than to resist, and in the scuffle was jabbed again, but managed to vomit in the cop’s red fat face. The cop laid Morning out with the billy against his neck, then stood over him, thumping his ribs until another cop stopped him.

Morning awoke face down on a thin mattress on a cement floor, his hands painfully cuffed behind him, his feet shackled and tied to an iron ring in the wall, and his ribs blue, bruised, and aching. The tiny cell was hardly wider than the mattress, and a solid steel door with a small sliding plate over a barred window protected the world from this innocent bystander. Morning shouted until a jailer came to tell him to shut up or be gagged or worse, and Morning complained that he needed to pee, the Southern Comfort no comfort now, but the cop explained that there would be a time in the morning for toilet, and that the prisoner best not piss in the cell ‘cause that would be defacing city property, which carried a minimum fine of one hundred dollars. As the cop spoke, which seemed to take hours, Morning noticed that his head felt bald against the mattress, and realized that his hair was gone. He asked why. It was explained that no dirty beatnik pinko was bringing fleas or lice into this jail which had been awarded a plaque from the governor for being the cleanest jail in the state. Morning said that he was honored to stay there, but he sure would like to pee. The cop slammed the plate back over the barred window, saying, piss in one a your books.