James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

"Baby, remember that each time you laid one on him, you laid on a blow for freedom. When all the dumb shits like him are pounded into the sewers, then people like us can start to live, then everybody can live…" She went on for several miles, listing the sins of the American middle-class businessman, saying all the things Joe Morning had said so many times in the past two years. She found a bottle of Scotch under the seat and a stack of bennies in her purse, and she let him take the wheel at New River when they stopped for gas. By Flagstaff they were popped up and tight both, singing protests and laughing and crying. They shouted The Revolution is Coming to drunk Indians and sleepless Mexicans wandering the highway's edge. On a lark they detoured through Grand Canyon, whipping past complacent, sleeping campers. They stopped to stand in the moonlight over the South Rim, feeling on their high the smallness of this tiny scratch in the earth. Linda softly sang Joan Baez ballads, and an occasional echo would drift back up on the wind out of the heart of the canyon. As they walked back to the car, she stopped; stuck out her hand, and said, "Joe Morning, you are a good cat."

Morning took the hand, saying, "You too," but the thought whoever and whatever you are stuck in his throat.

They raced on across the desert, that night, the next day, across rock and brown earth, through receding heat mirages to the green shade and cool, cool blue of Tahoe.

Morning spent the first three or four days worrying about living in the cabin near Meeks Bay with Linda, but she showed little interest in his sex life; he relaxed. The days were easy, cool from the first cold dip in the lake until the last brandy after dinner. They both read and slept most of the time or lay in the mountain sun until the salesman's face faded from Morning's dreams. There was a party down the beach one night the second week, and Morning found himself quickly smothered in Scotch and women. He drank, he fucked, he kissed, it seemed, a thousand women that night, and the next day, sleeping off the drunk, he dreamed that one of the women had been Linda, and then it was the salesman, kissing him, and then Linda and the salesman were clawing at each others crotches, and Morning was angry, until they began tearing at his clothes… and he woke.

As he lifted his head off the bed, a sledge hammer crashed into his forehead. He reeled back, rolled off the bed, his eyes crossing and giggles tickling up his throat. Sitting on the floor, he giggled again, groaned, stood, then made a circling lunge toward the bathroom door, the bathroom between their bedrooms, the door he had always been so careful to lock, so careful to knock on, but this morning he slammed into it, thinking only of cold water splashing his hot, painful face.

Linda stood, unstartled, before the mirror, obviously carefully preparing her face for something. "Hello, baby," she said, smiling. "Come on in," she said.

But now it wasn't easy to think of her as Linda. She had tied her hair back with a blue velvet ribbon, and she had almost finished with her face, except for one small false eyelash which she still held expectantly in her hand. This made her face seem slightly unbalanced, but it was still a lovely woman's face, but only the face. Below ran a bare, somewhat thin, white hairless chest without even a budding titty to break the line. There was one male retarded mockery of a nipple, but a stretched diagonal scar supplanted the other. Linda's chest seemed to be winking conspiratorily at him, and Morning giggled again. And then his eyes dropped below the bare chest and the naked waist, and he laughed out loud. A huge throbbing erection cast its vote for some kind of masculinity, raised a one-armed salute to the world, as if to say, Whatever he is up there, I'm by God a man. Morning doubled with laughter.

"You mother-fucking straight son of a bitch, don't you laugh," Linda screamed, her voice more like a woman's than ever before. And Morning didn't pause. "Stop it!" she screamed again. "Stop it!" But Morning couldn't stop.

He laughed as if he hadn't for years. There was, no more than there naturally is, no malice in his mirth. He even expected Linda to join him, but she stomped her foot, shook her head as if it were weighted with a heavy witch doctor's mask, and screamed, "Stop it! I'll kill you! Stop it!" Then she slapped him. She slapped him with both hands, flying at him like a little dog, her fine mouth curled in hate. Morning stumbled out of the bathroom and fell back across his bed, still roaring, rolled off, and felt his head bounce off the night table, then heard the sea-like roar of oncoming unconsciousness. The last thing he remembered was a rather bony white foot with tiny red toenails swinging at his head, but he couldn't get his hand up to stop it.

Morning felt, though he couldn't think why, that he had been asleep for a long, long time, leaving his brain groggy and stupid with sleep, a troubled sleep too, a heavy bond holding him, sticky, smelling as sweet as taffy. Waking took time. More unconscious than alert, he rolled to his stomach, pushed up to his knees, then stood, and for the second time in two days, though he thought it the same day, he fell toward that bathroom door. Leaning heavily on the sink, he threw up a dribble of clear liquid, then he rinsed his mouth, drank, then immediately threw the cold water from stomach to sink. He rinsed his mouth again. Then he raised his head, not to look in the mirror, but merely to hold his head up for a change, and in the silvered glass was reflected the ghost, the face which haunted him into the Army, across the sea, his own face.

(We all see things we can't face at one time or another; even I once ran as Joe Morning ran from that image. Picture, if you can, a gargantuan draft horse ripped in half by lightning from a summer shower, then a boy that afternoon racing on a bareback pony to see the destruction and finding the front quarters and head moving and jerking and grunting, and his horse shying away in the mud, then the boy advancing with a thick live oak branch, afraid to run, for he had never known running, his code allowed no running room, stepping up to the heaving carcass and swinging his cudgel against the withers with that mad terror named courage. The carcass convulsed. A three-hundred pound sow backed out of the cavern she had gnawed into the rank flesh, entrails and lights draped from her shoulders, congealed blood and flesh dripping from her grunting mouth. A jaded sneer wrinkled her nose and she was ready to fight for her pounds of flesh. I ran; she followed me in spirit. My grandfather spoke of pigs rooting among the corpses between the trenches; I couldn't stand that.)

The visage in the mirror wasn't exactly Morning's. His neatly clipped beard was gone, and his face, it seemed, with it. Pancake foundation lay thick on his cheeks. An angry red slash gaped open in mockery of his mouth. Dark, blue-shadowed, lined, amazed eyes glared under drooping mink lashes. A long blond wig, sensuously mussed, hung to his shoulders. The hand that touched his face sported teardrop nails of blood red. His body became aware of the rustle of a white nylon nightgown, a cotton stuffed bra pinching his chest, his crotch feeling naked in panties, and stockings encasing his legs. Even the hair on his chest and legs had been shaved. He dried his face carefully, then walked about the cabin looking for Linda. Her things were still there, but she was gone. He did find seven color Polaroid pictures of himself in various stages of being dressed, but the eighth picture wasn't there. He looked among the empty sacks and boxes on the bedroom floor, but the picture wasn't there either. Price tags and cash receipts were though, and he calmly marveled at the price of perversion. Then he went to the kitchen and fixed breakfast.