James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

The destruction of the room had cleansed us of hate and fear and pretense, had left us only laughter and our bare skins, more than enough for salvation. We died in violence, but were resurrected in laughter.

Downstairs, after the party was over, we found Morning slumped against a plaster column, one arm around the chipping evidence of more ornate days, one hand clutching an empty bottle of TDY rum. Infirm, blind, perhaps even dead, someone suggested. We sacked his slack body behind a couch, out of Air Police sight, then settled in, since it was still quite early, for, as Quinn said, more and more serious drinking. Not that we were sullen, but that we just drank all the time anyway. We understood it was an evil poison, causing madness more often than not, but it was our way through the mask, and nothing else seemed as appropriate.

But other winds were blowing…

Over in the 9th ASA the mood must have been just about the same as ours. The troops had planned a company roll call for the Saturday night after Good Friday. Not a Trick Roll Call, which was bad enough (bird colonels had strokes etc.), but a Company Roll Call with over three hundred men signed up, solemnly pledged to take part in the Roll Call, Riot, and General Disorder. The company officers, sly as officers often manage to be, had broken wind of the event and planned, secretly, to close the pass box Saturday morning. But the foxes smelled the dogs' shit, and moved the roll call to Friday night. Thus, in a very direct way, the Good Friday Night Riot was caused by the officers, sly devils, of the 9th ASA, and in an indirect way by Joe Morning, professional innocent.

You see, still other plots were brewing…

Cagle, only an EM but silent and devious, had chanced upon a funeral procession the week before, a silent line of pallbearers, candle carriers, road guards, and the corpse laid out in a fine white lace shrouded coffin looking for all the world like a big giant birthday cake. He inquired of a professional candle carrier and discovered that the coffin had been rented from the local undertaker for a very small fee, considering the immoral beauty of the frilly pine box. This night he rented this lovely coffin without a word to a soul, and returned to the steps of Haddad's place, ten holy candles in hand but no smile on his face, solemnly saying, "We must bury Joe Morning before morning; we must bury our dead before they stink." We tittered, but he silenced us with a frown stolen from an assistant undertaker in Kansas City. And as the coffin was filled with the body, then shouldered in the dim light, we became as silent as mourners.

And so we formed: pallbearers six, Quinn, Franklin, Levenson, Collins, Haddad, Peterson; road guards two, Novotny, Cagle; and one to count cadence, Krummel; the corpse we carried, Morning; tears in our eyes, pride on our drunken faces; fuck all the rest.

We marched to the measured beat of a dirge, pagans bearing the fallen to his pyre, the coffin level with the pallbearers' shoulders, candlelight and lace flickering in the night. It seemed for an instant, or longer perhaps, as we marched that we were as sad as if Joe Morning were really dead, as if we understood that he had been the best of us all, the most damned of us all, the most damned and the best. Step, pause, mourn Joe Morning, and move, solemn, silent, drunk, our homage paid. With each slow step the earth sank beneath us, tears plied our distant faces, and we knew no hope of resurrection, and tears plowed the dust of our faces. Lord knows where we might have ended that night, our sadness was that great. I headed us where I might, Cagle and Novotny stopping taxis and jeepnys and calesas at every corner, leading down dark rutted off-limits streets, past cribs where blankets separated the struggling pairs, past bars where card games stopped and beers paused between hand and mouth; into, into and through, the labyrinths of the market, among slabs of meat nailed by rusty hooks, where this morning's fish became tonight's garbage, through the darkness, and finally out at the blazing light of Chew Chi's kiosk, jammed as it was to the walls with the 9th ASA, mourning things of their own.

They poured out behind us, two hundred fifty strong. I picked up the beat to the usual 120, and the dirge became a roar, anger, mirth, carnival, death. My men sang, their grief gone:

We are Krummel's raiders.

We're rapers of the night.

We're dirty sons a bitches.

An' we'd rather fuck than fight.

And the ASA was singing, to the tune of the old Western, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon":

Behind the door her father kept a shotgun,

He kept it in the summer and the merry month of May.

And when I asked her father why the shotgun,

He said, "It's for her lover, who's in the ASA.

ASA! – Suck! suck!

ASA! – Suck! suck!

He said, "It's for her lover,

Who's in the ASA!"

Suck! Suck!

As you might remember, about fifty thousand Filipinos also called Town their home, though we often forgot. On Saturday night they would have expected it; on an ordinary night they would have been unhappy, but not too angry; on Good Friday, man, they went insane. The police switchboard, the Town switchboard, and the Base switchboard all jammed at once with irate calls and threats of international incidents and war. With the telephones down, the Air Police, using radios and intelligence, formed up with the Town fuzz, and came to do harm to us, racing toward the market with about forty jeeps, and six hundred sirens. It came to me that I was slightly out of place at the head of this mob, but it also came to me that I belonged here more than with the law, I was more my Trick's man than the Army's. So I gave the only order, they tell one in basic, which will stop a marching company in less than two steps: GAS!

The troops dispersed, rats down holes of darkness, and when the law arrived, they found only innocent Joe Morning asleep in his coffin. The jeeps circled once like a band of raiding Comanch', then sped after the shadows, but they were only shadows fleeing from their headlights. I, as an eyewitness, can categorically state that any damage, except to religious sensibilities or to shinbones fleeing through the night, was done by this marauding band of jeeps. There were four accidents within my hearing. A lone late arrival flying around a corner in the edge of the market clipped the side of the sari-sari store under which Novotny and I were hiding. The whole corner came off, the small building tilted, and Cagle rolled off the roof. He hit the ground running, and by the time the jeep turned around Cagle was singing, "Ho, ho, ho. You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!" and in a flash, he vaulted a fence and disappeared, leaving a bewildered AP behind him, shouting to an empty street, "Stop or I'll shoot – I guess he got away."

Morning fared as well as any of us. The APs woke him in the coffin, asked him what the hell he was doing in a coffin, to which Morning answered, "I'm dead, you dumb fuck." They wrote him up for conduct unbecoming a member of the armed forces. "For being dead and kidnapped by vandals, they give me an IR?" Morning said to a harried Dottlinger the next day. (Capt. Saunders had gone back to the States again.) Dottlinger took his pass for seven days, saying, "Lord, I don't know what's happening in this world. I just don't know." For the seven days without pass, Morning became a national hero. All over Base: "Hey, that guy there. He was the one in the coffin!"

No one else was caught or connected with the march. Hardcore Townies just were not caught by Air Policemen, and we were all professional Townies. There was a period, shortly before the Huk raid, which I haven't spoken about partly because it wasn't really important and partly because I'm somewhat ashamed of my conduct during these few weeks. Cagle, Novotny, Morning, Quinn, Franklin, and I would sit in the market after curfew, drinking beer, daring the APs to come in and get us. They never touched us. In fact, I'm the original Gingerbread Man. I had to relax sometimes. Dottlinger gave me foul looks, and Tetrick commented, "You guys are all going to get killed someday, and I'm gonna laugh like hell," but I'd learned from Morning how to play innocent too, so I did. The United States Government picked up the damage tab, as it should have: foreign affairs are strange and expensive adventures.