James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

"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.

Morning, of course, couldn't hold his bladder, though he tried, so spent the rest of the night laying in his own waste and stink, cursing the world for that waste and stink. Damn, it had always been this way. Expelled from school for someone else's smoke in the John; whipped by his mother for the kid next door's lies; punished at random for the sins of others, he took to sins of his own, smoking, lying to his mother, and he was never caught.

The next day he found himself charged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and, yes, defacing city property. Morning pleaded not guilty and asked for a lawyer, but the justice of the peace said guilty without looking up, dismissed the resisting charge, sentenced him to two hundred dollars or two months in jail. Morning shouted appeal, but the justice of the peace told him no appeal was allowed for misdemeanors in that state.