James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

Late the night before Gallard was to return, Abigail came while I was sleeping. I woke with her fallen on my chest, her mouth against my ear, her tears on my face. I held her.

"Jake," she sobbed. "I'm sorry. I'm a fool. I want to break your leg again, keep you here. I love you. I won't push."

Her mouth was wet and rubbery with gin against mine, hot, hungry; her teeth nipped at my lower lip. She had been to the Club with one of the younger doctors, but had slipped out into the night and run all the way to the hospital.

"And I'm drunk," she said, sitting up.

"That's okay; I'm asleep…"

"And having wonderful dreams," she whispered. She stood up, her hands smoothing the wrinkled white linen dress down over long tight thighs. "Please," she whispered, then left, quick and graceful with pride, hips swaying slightly with drink and heat. "Please."

Gallard came back from Hong Kong, had me rolled into a room, nearly ripped the cast off, threw a smaller one on, then handed me my crutches, saying, "I want to see you in my office, Sgt. Krummel." Then he walked away.

As I stood, my brain reeled a bit and my eyes unfocused, and my first swinging step swung a little loose.

"Let me help you at first," the orderly said.

"Buzz off, jack, I got it under control."

"Well, fall on your ass, wise guy. Nobody'll care."

"You're telling me," I said, swinging out of the room.

He sat, back to the door, feet propped on a typing table, smoking a furious cigar. The blue cloud of smoke whirled about his head as if he had just stepped out of it and his words were as forcefully calm as the orders of a potentate when he said, "Shut the door, Sgt. Krummel." I did, then sat down across the desk from his back.

"I didn't tell you to sit down, sergeant," he said, still facing the wall.

I said nothing.

He turned quickly, pointed his cigar at me, the chewed frayed end, saying, "I didn't tell you to sit down, sergeant."

"You notice I didn't ask you. You got some shit in your ear, man, don't try to lay that military jazz on my ass."

He looked down for a moment, then half-grinned. "If there's any shit, as you say, in my ear, then you put it there, Krummel."

"I seem to remember you saying that it was your idea."

"We all make mistakes," he said. "I don't know if I should turn you over to the Air Police or the psychiatrist. One or the other, for sure, but which… Oh, not that it's not good," he said, digging it out of his drawer. "Layman that I am, I still know it's good, you might even call it art, as long as you say art for art's sake, if my jargon is correct. But it is evil, Krummel, a lovely lie and twice as evil for being lovely. Maybe you're like that, but not mankind. I've only been so frightened in quite the same way once before in my life.

"The war had caught me after I graduated from Drake, or I caught the war, you might say, and I joined with flying in mind, but ended up being a medical supply officer. At the end of the war I was on Okinawa while they were still mopping up. A medical convoy had stalled atop a small ridge, and in the valley below I could see Marines chasing women and children through a cane field, shooting them down, laughing, shouting, jumping for real joy. I counted seven women and nineteen children shot down and left to rot.

"The patrol came up the ridge later, to see what was wrong with our trucks. They were young and bright and happy, kids with new toys, a new shipment of carbines, the first they'd seen and they scared me to death." He paused, puffed billows of smoke from the battered cigar. "This," he said, pointing to the manuscript, "made me feel the same way.

"Oh, not that it's not good, but it's just not true…"

"It was meant to be true not beautiful. If it's good," I said, "that's an accident of truth."

"You're mad as the March Hare, Krummel."

He went on at some length about the necessity for truth in art.

"Hey, stop it will you," I said. "All you're saying is that you've met a murderer, found him interesting, liked him, and you're ashamed of that part of you which loves violence as much as I do, and since you don't know how to deny me, you're trying to make me feel guilty about something I did honestly. The trick is to deny actions but never people. Easy. Actions can be evil; people can't. Joe Morning taught me that, though he didn't mean to."

"You're right, of course. I just wanted you to see the blackness of your own soul," he said, grinning out of smoke.

"That's what it's all about," I said.

"No hope for you, Krummel. Speaking of hope: Morning's cast is off, and he still can't or won't walk. He says he has feeling but no control…"

"No shit," I interrupted with a huge laugh.

Gallard frowned, perplexed, then went on. "I sent the psychiatrist in this morning, but Morning wouldn't talk to him. The shrink said, 'Well, Pfc Morning, I'm going to talk to you until you talk to me,' and Morning said, 'Well, Major Shrink, go right ahead. I was just going to jack off for the first time in about two months, so it ought to be something to take notes about,' and he proceeded to do so until Major Psychiatrist left. And he refuses to go back until Pfc Morning changes his attitude, to which I said, 'If he changes his attitude there, of course, won't be any need for you to go back.' Most shrinks are all right; overworked, but all right, but this guy is a real idiot. Don't repeat that or I'll have you jailed," he chuckled.

"Will he walk?"

"Who? Morning? Sure. He's a healthy kid, and from what you've told me about him, he should make it. Why don't you get an orderly to dress him in convalescent fatigues and put him in a chair and you boys roll and hop down to the Halfway House for a Seven-up."

"A Seven-up?"

"Tell the waiter I sent you and he'll drop about three fingers of Scotch in the bottle. Twice, but no more."

"Scotch? Seven-up? You gotta be kidding."

"If you're going to be subversive, you of course have to make sacrifices." He laughed and waved me out.

"Hey," I said, stopped in the door, "I'm glad you liked it."

"I'm not so sure I'm glad I liked it. Now go on; I've got healing to do."

As Morning and I made our crippled way along the sidewalk, the sun fell like golden rain on our faces, and the grass burned green beside us, and the green of the forest along the fairways was black, and the sky above crackled electric blue. Morning lifted himself out of the chair with his arms, saying, "A man could think about living in a place like this. Beautiful."

"It's all right."

"Krummel, you're a turd. A beautiful turd, but a shit all the same." He laughed and rolled on. "Funny, you know, how being crippled and maybe dying and even frankly wanting to die cleared my brain. Somehow, man, my life seemed to sort itself out while I was down. I began to see order in all the madness and shit."

"Maybe," I said. "You suggesting compulsory bed rest for the world till it straightens out."

"Maybe," he said. "There was just one thing."

"Yeah?"

"I'd forgotten about laughing, man. When Gallard told me you were here and all that crazy crap you got into at the beginning, I thought, 'Man, if it drags Krummel down, there ain't no hope for a fool like me.' Then when you came bopping in like a big crazy cat, full of piss and vinegar and shit, and suffering for my soul like you were my second mother or something. I don't know, I felt deserted for a moment, then when you wheeled around and roared out like Lionel Barrymore or something, muttering under your breath like an old woman. I don't know, I cried for a long time that morning – Morning mourning all morning – but when I came out of it, I kind of remembered all the shit I put you to, all the times you saved my ass, and I even laughed about that bad scene right before Vietnam, all that running, man, and that horrible fucking hole you made me dig, and them thirty thousand push-ups – my arms got so big I had to get rid of all of my tailored fatigue shirts – but most of all I… I remembered that day you got the snipers.