James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

"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.