James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

As I walked behind the bar, the two girls scooted around the other end and out the door like flushed quail. I opened a beer, poured it in my mouth, then over my head. For some reason I looked around the room for Morning and wondered why he wasn't there, then wondered why I was. And as the police and APs came in the door, the hurting began.

Gallard and Abigail cried and cursed as they repaired me, but I merely sat and endured. The words I spoke were to ask Gallard to knock me out for a while. I didn't tell them about Morning; I didn't know about Morning.

So there it is.

I told them about Morning the next afternoon, sitting on Gallard's porch watching the shadows leap over the ridges, down the valley, over the ridges, across the sky, just trying to tell them about Morning as moths as pasty as powdered sugar and one butterfly as big as my swollen, bandaged hand and black as dried blood contest the border between day and night; moths out too early, butterfly out too late, white moths, daemons of the night, butterfly black as day, and Joe Morning gone… perhaps if he had known that I shot him… but then perhaps not, too.

The morning of November 3, 1963. As I waited for my plane to Clark I noticed in the Stars & Stripes that the Diem's had been overthrown and killed by a junta of Vietnamese generals. Let shit eat shit, I said.

As I walked out to the small transport a little ceremony was being performed for a casketed body also going down to Clark. A tanned airman held a flag and another played a casual taps as the coffin was loaded by a fork-lift. A high wind came across the mountains, and the flag crackled against the high blue sky, and the wind clipped the sad notes right out of the horn. I thought he might be another Vietnam casualty, but it turned out that his steady shack has stabbed him with a pair of scissors. I kissed Abigail goodbye, hugged Gallard, and threw Morning's glasses in a butt can. There will be nights, I thought as I climbed on the plane, but no more mornings now, just windy afternoons and nights…

And so I flew back home, across the sea, more hopeful than Morning, less hopeful than ever before.

The day after I was discharged at Oakland, John Fitzgerald Kennedy died from an assassin's bullet in Dallas. It took me two months to get home. This was no way for things to end, no ending I could handle, and I carried Joe Morning on my back across the breadth of America, until finally a cold wind blew me home again.

And that same wind has blown where it might, Africa, Southeast Asia, and around for three years since and Morning has been with me all the days, but the manuscript has been gathering dust through that time till now. After he came back to life, I couldn't go on. I'm back home now, recovering from wounds again, just back, from Laos and the CIA, and this letter came last week.

Well, old war horse, I've written pretty often in the past year or so, but haven't had much chance to mail a letter. The postal service out here isn't so great.

It's been tough. I know you told me it would be, and I believed you, but you were right, I didn't know.

It's not the fighting, not at all, in fact I look forward to a fire-fight now days, and I see them often now days too. The army is right behind us all the time now and it is only a matter of time. That phrase works in lots of ways – time weighs more than the base plate of a mortar or five hundred rounds of belted thirty caliber ammo. You didn't tell me about all the time I would spend sitting on my ass under a banana tree, you didn't tell me lots of things…

I'm hard now, man, hard. In spite of the food, I've filled out; got my growth, as you'd say. I steal vitamins whenever I can and, though I can't laugh about it, I know that you do, laugh at the picture of the great revolutionary dashing through the jungles with a bottle of One-a-Day brand vitamins in his pocket. I'm as brown as a gook now, but I'm not one, and they remind me every day. They kept all the shit for me, cooking, washing dishes, until I busted one up who asked me to wipe his ass. God, they're nearly all as dumb as old Dottlinger. They'd rather collect taxes from poor gooks like themselves than rob American bases. They're shit. I guess I'm shit too now. Three days ago I gut-shot an old man who spit on me. He sat in the sun for a long time with his guts in his arms, till I shot him, not out of compassion but out of disgust. Hard.

But somehow easier too. I wish you'd go see my parents, man, tell them that I'm sorry, that I love them (at least the memory of them), and that if I could find a way, I would come home. Don't tell them I'm dead.

But then the hardness is back. I guess you'll get this while teaching at some fat-ass girls' college in the North. The army has been on our tails for four months and I haven't slept much and haven't eaten much and I think maybe I've killed a thousand men and I don't even know why. I haven't eaten beef since I saw you last, haven't had many beers, and don't even know why. I'm not crying, man, because I did what I thought was right, I did it, while most men sit on their fat asses not even caring about right, and though I'm hungry and I've got sores all over my legs and my left arm doesn't work too well since I caught a bullet last May, I know I'm a man now. I don't worry about that. I'm only sorry that there wasn't an easier way.

There isn't much else to say. I just wanted you to know that I loved you, old horse, and that I was a fool. I'm not crying, man, but it's been tough, and I won't be sorry when it is over.

Your friend,

Joe Morning

A note came with the letter, saying that this American had said that I might send one hundred American dollars to the person who sent this letter to me. I didn't do it.

I'm glad I was in bed when the letter came, though I'm not glad to be in bed again. God, the images rush back. Morning running for the latrine with his ass bobbing white in Dottlinger's face, the mutiny, crying over the dead Huk he wouldn't spit on six months later. And the things he told me. Fighting on the university lawn, fighting in Birmingham, fighting. But the picture that hangs with me: Morning roaring out of that van on Hill 527, desperate, romantic, mad with hate, sick with hate, breaking the back of the attack with one fine last gesture, so fine, so fatal that it seems a shame he didn't die there while he still believed in his hate, seems a shame. But he didn't. I don't suppose I'll ever know how he died, but I'm sure it was dirty and painful and impossible to bear, and I'm certain he bore it well.

It has been tough all over, though. After I drank my way back to Texas after my discharge, after I dried out for a few weeks, after I lost Ell again, I did go to Africa, silly as it may sound, but I met a CIA man in Johannesburg before I could hire out. I told him, when he offered me a job over two warm beers, that I didn't care who I killed for, just so the pay was good and the action often. He didn't answer me, but he didn't contradict me either. They sent me through Special Forces training at Bragg, then to language school at Monterrey, then to northern Thailand. An Army major and I slipped into Laos, periodically, to train Meo tribes to resist invasion from the north. Unfortunately we couldn't train them not to sell us out to the North Vietnamese regulars operating along the edge of the Plain of Jars. They must have believed in capitalism, because three different times the major and I ran out of one end of a burning Montagnard village as the North Vietnamese hardhats ran in the other. The third time the major didn't make it and I took a teacup full of shrapnel in my ass then ran three miles, mostly downhill, to the airstrip. And now I'm home again, on my ass, wondering how it all happened, how it will end, why it always happens to me…