James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

Copyright © 1969 by James Crumley

It's funny how stories get around. Just the other day Captain Gallard mentioned that one about the car. He hadn't spoken for several minutes, but had sat, staring out my window toward the sixteenth green running his fingers through his curly hair. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, drifting far from the Philippines, all the way back to Iowa and his childhood, as he told me about the mythic automobile of his youth.

You know the story: the car, the big, fancy one you've always wanted and dreamed about, is for sale in a nearby city (always the city) for twenty-five dollars. They always tell that part first, as they told Gallard about this Lincoln in Des Moines. Then the eternal catch: an insurance salesman died in the car on some deserted road; died, then rotted, and the stench has seeped into the very metal. "And you know how death stinks," he said to me, hands in his hair again, those hands (farmer's hands, short and flat and strong, the tips of the middle two fingers on the right hand pinched off in a corn picker long ago), not at all the hands of a bone surgeon.

"I even saved the money," he said with a wistful smile. "But I didn't go to Des Moines. I don't know why. It wasn't the stink so much – no one would smell it but me as I roared up and down those gravel roads at night – but I couldn't figure out how to get a girl in it, and you know cars are no good without girls. So I didn't go," he said, leaning back and chuckling. "Didn't get the girl I had in mind either. At least not then." He laughed again, smiled, then let his eyes wander back to the golf course and the two girls working on the green a short way down the hill across the road. The two were short, stocky mountain girls, Benguet Igorots, hips wrapped in many skirts and feet bound in oversized tennis shoes. They resembled those foolish and energetic dolls with weighted bases which when hit always swing up for another punch. But that wasn't what I saw reflected in his eyes, not them, no, nor the bright green fairway fringed in dark pine, nor the city of Baguio misty and lost in the distance, none of these, but the long delicate snout of that mythic Lincoln.

In my not-so-distant youth the car was a Cadillac for one hundred dollars (even dreams are subject to inflation, I suppose) in San Antonio. A doctor, so the story went, had driven into the nearby cedar hills, then blasted a neat hole ringed with brain tissue through the top. I also dreamed, and also failed to follow, though not for so sensible a reason as Gallard. I was simply afraid it wasn't true, and I certainly didn't want to find out. I still hear of the car, though, as I'm sure you do. A Thunderbird in Los Angeles. A Corvette in Atlanta. A Jaguar in Boston. The cities, the cars change, but not those dusty boys in small towns, nor the dream. I'm sure of that; but no longer am I certain if we dream of the power and beauty of the machine or of the stink. Perhaps, and some say for sure, they are the same, but I don't know. I just know the dream is real. Somewhere back in America grown men – doctors, lawyers, corporation chiefs – waste their fluid into the metal, decay and drip, drip, decay and fall, so you and I might dream – and be fooled into a nightmare of death and a cold wind over an open grave.

Gallard doesn't care for me to talk like that, and when I told him how I felt about the dream car, he accused me of seeing all myths, thus God, as a conspiracy. When I answered "Certainly," he accused me of a lack of seriousness. I reminded him that only the day before he had said I was too serious. He maintained that both accusations were valid. "Do you see evil everywhere," he then asked, "or just reflect it?" (I remember Joe Morning asking me the same question once.)

Gallard cares for me, tends my mending arm and leg, carefully X-raying the leg once a week to check the pin. He claims the X-rays are really a plot to sterilize me, and I agree. But all this time he is really searching for another wound, a festering, dripping sore he thinks he smells. He hasn't discovered it yet; but I'll tell him someday. Like a sly old coyote around poisoned meat, he circles, retreats, holds his hunger. But soon the blood and flesh will be too much in his nose, and he must eat or go mad. Maggots purify an open wound, or so I'm told, and I don't suppose I'll really be well until the day Gallard eats the blood of my friend, Joe Morning, on these pages he gave me to record upon. "Therapeutic," Gallard calls it. "Madness," say I. But he is a doctor in the full sense of the word and he cares for wounds.

He smelled it quickly, perhaps even that first day I arrived at the Air Force hospital on Camp John Hay near Baguio. I don't recall very much about the Med-evac flight from Vietnam – a bulky pain in my whole right side, a forest of gleaming needles, a constant plain of white faces. Then the plane approached the island of Luzon. At first the land was a speck, then a dot, then it grew into a disturbing blot on the pure surface of the ocean, a green-black imperfection in a blue universe. Soon it became an eruption, a timeless monster raising itself painfully from the silent depths of the Mindanao Trench, slime oozing down its steeply ridged back, circled in a froth of white where the sea boiled at contact. Closer, I felt the aged beast must reach up for the plane and brush it away like a troublesome gnat, and I was afraid, again, choked and blinded by fear, but as suddenly as it came, the fright disappeared, the world tumbled back to its rightful place. Slime grew back to thick jungle, and froth eased into restless waves napping at the mountains' feet, and I… and the sleeper back to his grave.

Again awake as the plane approached Baguio, I glimpsed the stark arrogant mountains tripping and falling among themselves, tumbling into the waiting, self-righteous valleys, and then the soft plateau resting above the gigantic disorder. Everything spoke peace: the quiet green fairways trimmed out of the deep black of a tropical evergreen forest; the thousand dazzling blue-eyed swimming pools winking and glittering among color-dazed gardens and quiet homes.

But I wasn't fooled. I still crouched in a radio van where grenades had scattered death like flowers; still hugged a ragged, skinny old man with blood blossoms adorning his chest. Like all warriors come home, I wasn't sure where or when the fighting stopped, nor did I know the difference between night and day. Then eyes, coal-black and curious above a patient green mask, said, "Take it easy, son." And so, for the moment, I submitted.

Many drug-weary days later, while I was still silent, Gallard came to ask after me. When I didn't answer, he raised his eyebrows almost to the black curls drifting over his short, square forehead, asking again with his face. I nodded toward the casts on my arm and leg, toward the traction apparatus, and shrugged as best I could. He shook his head slightly as if to say, "Okay. Take it easy. I'll be back another time." A wise man, I thought, as he left.