James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

"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.