James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

But he forgot, as best as Joe Morning ever forgot anything, during the heat of the next summer. He marched in Birmingham, sat-in in Tampa, sang all over the Southland, sang about freedom, and all the while bound by his love for violence, and every step closely watched by Richard. He had to grab Morning in Tampa when a skinny deputy spit his chaw on them, but he couldn't have held Morning alone. Morning held part of himself, and he made it through the summer.

In the fall he drifted to Phoenix with a chick he had worked with, and he lived off her and his guitar until January, then went back to the fund-raising scene. In San Francisco he stayed away from the club where he had seen the shimmering vision of Linda Charles, stayed away until he became conscious of his absence, then he went, sober, sweating, but she wasn't playing there. Relieved, he went in to exorcise her (him), and found himself enjoying the show. It was funny, and did poke at the hypocrisy of middle-class America. And professional too, said the guy at the next table who said, and who looked the part, that he had just retired as a 49er defensive lineman. "These guys aren't queer. They're just actors trying to make a living. That one guy there," he said, pointing to a slim stripper, "has got six kids out in San Mateo." After the show he and Morning went down to Chinatown, drinking together until the ham-handed bear of a bastard made a clumsy pass at him. Morning swung on him, but the guy lowered his head, and Morning broke his hand. He ran like the wind, pulling over barstools behind him, and escaped with his life and virtue intact.

The old doctor who set the bones that night gave Morning a long lecture on the vices of the world. "The devil wears many faces, son, many masks. Be forever on guard. Tempt him not for his strength is the strength of ten men," he said, forming the cast with white hands connected to thin arms on which all the veins had collapsed from shooting. "Tempt him not. That will be twenty-seven fifty," he said, but Morning ran out of the emergency room, shouting, "The devil wears many masks, old man," diabolical laughter falling behind him as he ran. (Six months later he mailed a check to the old doctor, but the old doctor mailed it right back with a short note, "Son, I know what the devil costs. You'll need this more than I.")

"Why do things always happen to me?" Morning asked Richard the next summer. "Why me?" and Richard answered, "They happen to all of us, man, so just stay cool." But coolness wasn't Morning's long suit, so Richard refused to let him demonstrate. Morning, in anger, moved to a more militant organization, and on the first sit-in of the summer at a dime-store lunch counter in Birmingham, he laid low a nineteen-year-old kid who only said Pass the salt, niggerlover. Then the kid's buddies moved in, and Morning left the civil-rights movement the same way he entered, swinging and kicking for holy hell.

Charged with felonious assault, Morning faced one to three years, but his mother, faithful Southern mother, had a cousin (in the South one has cousins everywhere) who shot pool with the judge. So instead of three years, he was exiled from Alabama, in effect. The charges were indefinitely postponed, but the case would be reopened if he crossed into Alabama to demonstrate for anything ever.

The anger he held for the judge's sentencing, he held until he was outside. Once again he walked away from his mother without a word, stopped long enough for his guitar and a flight bag, then, anger still his only impulse, he walked from downtown, out 3rd, all the way to the city limits before he stuck out his thumb pointed toward Phoenix. But anger doesn't lend itself to hitching rides: the action is too slow, the long waits while asphalt puffs in the sun and the sparse shade of a jackpine protects neither man nor angry beast against the hot, dusty winds trailing semi's. The time after midnight, which may be the witching hour but ain't the hitching hour, he stood at lonely crossroads, stood for hours that never end, then ran from side to side from road to road at the call of the headlights booming up through East Texas piney woods, hoping only for a ride to anywhere, and again the semi's roaring past like fast freights. Then the afternoon sun like lava on rocky West Texas hills and a man makes the only shade there is, fatigue and dust and sunburn like a mask eating his face, until finally he hasn't even a damn for the arrogant cars hissing past, slinging gravel at his hot feet. Then Phoenix rising in the heat waves as he watched from the back of a cotton-picker truck filled with Mexicans, and he was ready to lay his burden down.

Four cold beers at his old girl's place, then he fell into his first long sleep. He slept for days, thirteen to be exact, in her bed, rising only to relieve himself or swill a glass of tepid water. But not so much sleeping, he said, but dreaming of sleep and dreams. He ran dreams like movies with intermissions for a leak, then right back to the film – war, honor, love, the past, the future – running until it seemed his brain could contain no more images, yet still going on like a bad Italian movie. Frightened, the girl called a doctor who merely sedated Morning into real sleep for another twelve hours, then told the girl to throw a glass of cold water into his face the next morning. He came up angry again, and was all right.

Back to the guitar and the bottle for a couple of months, then the music became enough. He sang professionally now, four thirty-minute sets six nights a week in a small sometimes coffee house sometimes bar, Harps on the Willows. He had never been better. More faithful to the box he played than the one he slept with, he barely noticed when she drove her small sports car back to Boston. But people were noticing him, and Morning never denied liking that. He played student gatherings on off-nights, then an occasional party at an English professor's house. He grew a beard to go with his long hair, and was soon a minor rage among new rich, pseudo liberal, culture vultures in Phoenix, even out in simple, suburban Scottsdale, and there he met his fear face to mask, Linda Charles.

The party was at a large, rambling house on three acres of clipped, watered grass. It was an engineer's house, filled with electrical gadgets, a button to flush, a button to roll off a neat amount of paper, ice makers, drink makers, and wired from asshole to elbow with sweet stereo. The floors were laid in rugs as thick as bear skin, and peopled with people fighting the way they made their money, the hesitantly liberal, the casual un-Godly who occasionally would quietly say "fuck" for special emphasis and quietly slap a fist into the other hand, and the women very careful not to blush. Morning came here, his credentials not much better than these who received him, came in a buckskin shirt stained with someone else's sweat, scuffed cowboy boots, and faded, frayed Levi's. He sang the soft protests, a few old English ballads (he could make me cry with even old hat "Barbara Allen"), then some wild bawdy Scotch songs, some popular comic snatches, then the dirtiest Irish roar he knew, and came on in the finale leading the group in "We Shall Overcome" like an intellectual cheerleader. He knew his audience. After him came the Twist as the crew-cuts and drizzle-heads paired off. He worked two sets, then a little mixing with the crowd, a few casual references to the Movement, and a crisp fifty from the hostess whom he had screwed in the English professor's bathroom four times before she hired him. Out here, though, he made gentle verbal passes at all the pretty women, flowers caught in plastic paperweights, but he never followed them through. He knew his audience.

But this particular night the Movement was moved out by a wonderful bit of risqué humor and singing by the hostess' personal friend, the famous female impersonator, one Linda Charles.