James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

The paperwork had bored me, so I left my tent to check guard posts, then climbed up the steel spotting tower in the center of the compound. I stayed there a bit, bumming a cigarette from the kid on duty. I was trying to quit for physical and professional reasons. Morning had tried to give me a bad time about it, and about wearing my watch with the face against my wrist, and carrying a.45 automatic, and the tiger-striped camouflage coveralls I used as a uniform of the day, and the razor-sharp bayonet slung in the scabbard sewn on my right boot, and the combat harness, etc. He couldn't piss me off, though. Quite frankly, I felt above such minor emotions, minor griefs, even above the constant irritant of dysentery which I, like the rest of the Det, seemed to have caught out of the air. Like a Trojan on the walls, or a Kamikaze pilot, I felt anointed, and afraid.

As I smoked, the day became perceptibly hotter, but a fragment of morning air drifted under the hot steel roof and I stayed a moment longer. Inside the outer perimeter, children played, wives gossiped, and their soldier husbands and fathers sat in shaded places and cleaned their old Springfields. Smoke from cooking fires ascended stiff columns straight into the ashen blue sky, but sounds wafted about the compound like the odor of burning charcoal: a soft curse and a grunt of pick into dry, rigid earth as the bunker diggers toiled; a metal squeak streaking from the Other Tit as nut and bolt strained metal to fit tightly; the clunk of an axe late after the swing or the sweeping fall of a tree from the cutters on the northern edge of the clearing. In spite of the activity, the compound, the scene, seemed essentially peaceful; perhaps because work is a peaceful occupation, whatever you're building. I was reminded of the American West, of building a fort against the hostile land, of peaceful treaty Indians camped about the stockade walls; out-riders, wood-cutters, and scouts moving out and back across the parched grass hills. And over all this, controlling each contraction of muscle in this new land, the confident, foolish idea that because man piddles in the earth with pointed sticks, because he shits in holes and covers it like a serene tomcat, because he cuts trees and replants them where he wishes, that because of these things man shall inherit the earth. That we shall be masters, inheritors with the tried and true strength of our brown arms and calloused hands and with great boldness and strength, never fearing for a moment the violent winds which might cast us like chaff across the land; nor afraid that the land itself might buckle and rip beneath our very feet and suck us into its soft hot core; nor afraid, least of all, that the aborigines who came before us can stand against us, feathers and paint and leather shields no hope against a Sharpes or a Henry. It seems our only fear might be of those who come behind us, the wave pushing behind us just as the Huns and the Vandals pushed the Visigoths into the Romans and the Romans into the sea. But we know there are none behind us, know we are the last, the best and the last of the barbarians, the conquerors, the long knives, the jolly green giants of history who move at first across the land with fire and sword, then with transistor radios and toothpaste, seeking not even greener grass, nor even movement itself, but merely senseless turds in the large bowel of history…

But I stayed too long in the tower; I revealed my position to the enemy. As I climbed down, Morning looked up from where he dug in the ammo bunker, saying, "Looking for them pesky redskins, Sarge?"

"And the angel of the Lord shall sink his scythe into the great winepress of the earth," I said, "and bring peace to the heathen."

"Stop stealing my lines, Sarge," he said, raising the pick, then plunging it deep into the ground.

"Stop stealing mine," I said, walking away.

I collected the Armalite and two clips from my tent, hooked two fragmentation grenades on my combat harness, and then walked down to where the log detail was stripping limbs from the felled trees. I watched, chatted with the guards, and had the second cigarette of the morning. The forest, though not as thick as it had looked from the compound, blocked out the sun fifty feet inside, so the men had cut their logs at the very edge. After splitting them, they cut them into five-foot lengths and, two men to a log, started carrying them back toward the compound along a trail beaten through the hip-high elephant-grass by previous details. I followed, last man behind one of the new guys, a kid from southern Ohio who hated the Army with remarkable passion because the dentists had pulled all his teeth during Basic. He thought nineteen premature for false teeth, and he let the world know it, bitching a while, then clacking his choppers, then bitching again. His buddy in front told him that the girls back in the ZI would just love it if he took out his plates and gummed their titties. Like all Army discussions, politics, religion, war, or false teeth, this one moved quickly to the terminal point of all of them: fucking. The kid laughed, only partly convinced, but in a way that promised he would try it with the first girl who showed him a bare breast.

I was still chuckling when the sniper shot. Before my mind recorded the sound of the rifle behind me or the snap as the round whipped past my ear, a hole magically winked two inches to the right of the base of his spine, blood and dust clouded before him, and his legs buckled. But even as my mind wasn't recording, it was working. I dove and rolled into the high grass at the right of the trail. Another shot skimmed the grass tops up the slope, and the ricochet scattered chickens and children in the outer compound.

"Stay down!" I shouted, but everyone had already burrowed into the grass roots. The snipers held their fire now. Either cutting out or waiting without revealing their position, I thought. Two shots from different rifles: no automatic weapons. One shot down, one up: one man in a tree, one on the ground, and probably a third covering who hadn't fired yet. Thank God for the grass. The protection of the outer perimeter was two-fifty or three-hundred yards uphill. I had twenty-five men, counting myself, but only five weapons. "Smoke!" I shouted. "Holler it up!"

As the cry for smoke drifted back up the hidden line, I crawled as close to the trail as I could. The kid's body slowly stretched out, easily, carefully, as if he carried eggs on his back. Once flat, he lay as still as the dropped log, his hands out in front of his head. He began to moan, to whisper please, but the moan seemed almost conversational, detached as if he might be having a discussion with an ant crawling below him. A rivulet of blood, black in the dust, beaded red hanging on the trampled grass, crept sedately back down the trail.

"Hey," I whispered. "Roll over here. Roll over, kid."

Another face appeared between two clumps of grass on the other side of the path. It was the kid from the front of the log, and he was crawling out into the path.

"Stay put," I said, but he came on.

"Harvey," he said. "Harvey, you bastard, I told you to take the front, you fuck head, I told you, I told you."

"Stay put, soldier," I said. "Goddammit, stay put, and shut up."

"Digs, Digs," Harvey said calmly, "Digs, I think they done shot my balls off. I sure believe they did." As he talked, he sounded calmer, but his body shook in quick tremors.

"Oh, Harvey, goddamn you, Harvey," the other one said, reaching out along the ground for Harvey's hand. His thumb disappeared in a burst of dust, and while he was throwing himself back into the grass, three quick but spaced shots searched the grass around him. Harvey shook harder, as if by vibration he would sink into the earth.

"Roll over here," I told him again. "Please roll over."

"Sarge? Sarge, is that you?" he muttered into the ground. "Sarge, can you find my teeth. I lost my teeth."