But a shadowed voice, then a cackle of laughter intruded from the unfamiliar darkness, and in the pale candlelight, a hunched, headless shape fumbled at the curtain. I raced, oh I raced from the snow, down, down across the hills to the rotting, mucking jungle again, and a bitter scream escaped the aching teeth of my mouth, and I launched myself at the shape of my enemy, fell, jerked up my pants, then lunged again.
The door ripped away, and I clubbed at the figure. We grappled and rolled, bumping down the slanted hall, the blood thick in my ears, then rolled down the steps to the darkened floor. The whack of my fist in his chest (I never thought he had a head I might hit) threw him back, and in the light from Novotny’s candle I saw Joe Morning sprawled like a bug squashed on the wall.
* * *
As Novotny explained that David had slipped away and cut off the lights, I clutched my crotch, moaning a thousand times. The pulsating mountain I reached for wasn’t even a slightly quivering molehill, but a bag of ashes in my hand. The snows had melted, running into mysterious underground rivers, and however cold they might flood, they would not be the snow again for a long weary cycle of time.
Then Teresita was there, her slacks on backwards, a convexo-convex bit of pale brown flesh winking from the hastily clutched zipper, explaining to the police who promised to lock up David until his father returned. It seemed they had to do this every time his father went away.
So wan and tipsy and aching I gathered Trick Two, herded them to the bus, then said goodbye to Teresita.
“I’m sorry. Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.”
“Yes. I too,” she said, “as much as you. I will come to the beach tomorrow and we will look again.” She touched my face with a gentle hand; her lips were fleshless skin under mine.
As the bus bounced away from the haunted whorehouse, Morning shouted up to me, “Jesus-shit, Krummel, you nearly broke my back. What did you think I was, that Jap ghost?” He laughed.
“That’s okay, Morning. You only fucked up a wet dream.”
* * *
She did come the next day, and it was good walking in the still dawn far down the beach to make love beside the easy swells breaking like whispers. She rubbed my bruises and kissed them. We swam naked, our laughter bright across the sun-sparkled water as we frolicked like silly children. Her heavy breasts scrambled in the water like puppies, their soft, wet noses nuzzling my chest. Once she lay on the beach as I swam far out, and when I came back, I almost cried at the beauty: the black gleaming span of her hair against the glare of the sand, the sweet melting brown of her body, the waiting blue of the sea, a rippled shower draping the mountains in a shimmering veil. I was naked man first flung from the sea, crouched humble over the sleeping paradise of woman. But pride, not of possessing her or the world but of simply and foolishly being a man, made me rise and look to the green mountains and across the faraway sweep of the sea… what for, my God, for what?
Later we watched the chameleon in my hut, then had a sweaty slide at love, and afterwards strolled the cooling sand as great rolling clouds piled up the horizon. When we said goodbye, we knew it was. (Though, of course, it wasn’t at all.)
During the trip back to Clark, Morning inquired as to where I had been going when I bumped into him the night before.
“Looking for running room, mother,” I answered. His face was hidden in the rattling darkness, but he was smiling.
8
Manila
Oh, if the comedy were only divine.
I, of course, select things to leave you with, but I must try to tell the truth, too. How nice if you retained, say, a picture of Slag Krummel swinging like a pagan, rioting, raping, lusting all over the place, or perhaps even Jacob Krummel, naked above nakedness, on a primeval beach, contemplating original sin as his woman beautifully sleeps. But, no, you’ll remember the way Morning made my voice vulgar in the darkness: You only fucked up a wet dream.
I have so few illusions; he robs me even of those.
But, by god, I’m having the last word here (which may be why I’m having any word at all), and if you are going to persist, and you will persist, you bastard, you will even endure, in remembering me stumbling across that darkened room, torn from the greatest fuck of the decade, my pants heaped around my ankles like a burlesque comedian, then I will also joggle your memory, aptly, of course. Whatever sort of harmless fool I played, it wasn’t me courting madness across that drunken lagoon, dancing with sweaty, sad Billy Boys, their make-up running off their eyes like cheap dolls left in the rain, it was that devil-may-care Morning. In his case the devil does care; Morning had an awful attraction to self-destruction, moral, physical, sexual.
I say this so you will remember that he did interrupt me. How odd, how odd the sexual connections we make. We all sleep in a circle.
Abigail kissed me this morning and I cupped a tiny breast fluttering like a baby chick in my hand. I strain in my bonds. Morning interrupts me again. I interrupt myself. Time is the interruption of space, or is it space, the interruption of time.
How silly I’m getting in my old age. How silly.
* * *
After Dagupan a strange uneasiness captured me. So much, so fast. The raid, then touching Teresita, and quickly now snips of rumor that the 721st might go to Vietnam, a persistent and persistently ignored rumor for the past months. I was ready to believe it, ready to go, ready for anything, I thought. I began staying apart from the Trick, spending my breaks and all my money in Manila. I soon squandered my savings. Teresita was lovely, long, and sweet, her body strong under placid skin, her pubic hair silken and straight, her love satisfying, and expensive. Moving once again away from commitments, as I had when I reenlisted, I made her take money for her love, made her eat the bitter grass. And when the money was gone, I wouldn’t go to Manila. This is not counting the seven hundred or so I’d won on the long restriction. Not a penny of it had been spent or even touched, but it abided in the form of figures in my savings book. A reserve, but for what I wasn’t sure. Morning had been after me since the restriction to let him use the money to ease us into the black market. My capital, his contacts, and he guaranteed to double it within the month, but I wouldn’t turn it loose. Not saying anything derogatory about Haddad, mind you, I just didn’t fancy myself as a black market czar. Enough money for my woman, my beer gut, and me.
Haddad had really done well on the market. He was well-suited to the business of business, generally no better or no worse than the average American businessman, and probably better educated than most. He wouldn’t cheat his friends; he was at least a political liberal, though economically he was of the buyer-beware school; and he was the only person I’d ever known who had read all of Proust. I think that may be the secret to his soul. He would work hard, and he saw the making of money the art one prepares his life for. God, he loved to make money, not for what it would buy, nor for power, but just for money. Plus he had imagination; and he never cheated me. If I could have convinced him to play the profit game, keep enough to live on and play again, and give the rest away, he would have been a better sort. But he said, very seriously, that the tax structure was such that… well, you know. But he was free with his money and when success laid half-ownership of a bar in Town in his hands, he planned an opening night party for the Trick. It was really a fine bar, an old Spanish home, two stories, set on half an acre of grounds, and it would have been a fine party… but it was Good Friday, April 12, 1963.
Good Friday, Karfreitag. Day of suffering, prelude to resurrection, day of judgment, epilogue of life. Good Friday?
* * *
We were on Break off a set of mids, in Town by 0730, drunk before 1000 and off to see the flagellants. Blood has always sickened me slightly, but I felt it was something I should see, or Morning convinced me it was something I should see.
They were at the edge of Town in a small and, as far as we knew, nameless barrio. Those flagellants who, during ordinary years, made their homes in Angeles made a point of arriving back home on Good
Friday; they were joined by a few weekend worshippers. A year spent dragging a heavy ironwood cross around, across Luzon, had built a scum-brown callous on their shoulders, down across the blades. Pain, spiritual anguish, and living on the charity of their brothers had seeped away the flesh of their faces, swelled the bones of their bodies, mottled their eyes. And here they lay their crosses down, not on a significant, bald hill, but among scattered nipa huts, on a dry, dusty street thick with stray dogs, rooting pigs, occasional chickens, and watched by the vaguely religious, the curious, and the sick. The Lord, their Father, refused them even the relief of a single cloud to intercede with the dry, parched heat of the sun, refused a single drop of rain, even the tiniest breeze. But the sky was split asunder all the day by passing jets tearing their angry tails of thunder behind them. The three, for this year there were only three though Morning said there had been twice as many as the year before, arrived slowly, singly, denied even the friendship of suffering, stopped at the end of the snaking path marking their trail. The path, if followed backwards, would lead you across the plain, through the heat, into the jungles thick with steam where the sun sucked the very moisture from the leaves, and through the jungle to the mountains thrust up in the earth’s time of agony, up trails which hung to the steep slopes with the uneasiness of mists. Up and across the highlands, past men with filed and betal-stained teeth who buried their dead sitting in clay beehive huts, past the missionaries who were telling these same men about Jesus’ suffering, but these same men laughed at those foolish devils carrying about wood not even good for fires, laughed, and sometimes killed them, and the missionaries too, but always with a laugh. But these had made it, and except where the monsoon or the casual passing of other men erased their marks, you could follow them backwards. As they came and eased their burdens to the ground, their backs bent in habit, they took up branches and whips and, with the same patience and calm with which they lugged their crosses, began to beat themselves without pause for food or drink; striking the sinful flesh until welts, then blood, rose from their skin. An occasional onlooker would join the devotion, until his sins were washed away too.
And above, jets tolled the sky.
“Such peace, man, on their faces,” Morning said as we watched, a basket of beer at our feet, shame in our eyes. “Wonder if it’s the pain, something in the pain?”
“Inflicting or enduring?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.
We watched and drank ourselves into a bright haze; watched until blood splattered in the dust at our feet. A single bright drop, as small as a tick, nestled in the sun-blond hairs on my arm. Almost without a word, we left. The word: Jesus Christ.
* * *
Before Haddad’s party, we attended the middle-class Good Friday: all the suffering endured by statues. A long march of wax and wooden and plastic Christs, wooden pain, plastic blood, and little boys in white robes. Though the streets were thick with bodies, the only sound was breath, shuffle of feet, click of beads, a silence of shame more than reverence. Those other three, fools, yes, still out in the darkness, still bent under their own blows, wailing sinful flesh with enfeebled arms and enhanced determination, the blood syrupy and thick with flies against their wounds.
* * *
Haddad’s party, had it been the end, would have been the perfect climax to this odd day. We ate a good dinner prepared by Toni the sad queer, good filets and beer in the old master bedroom on the second floor, but Haddad had hired sad, naked whores to serve in high heels and long white gloves. He expected the last course to be love among greasy plates patched with parsley, but the girls were so ashamed of their nakedness — for what he paid them to do this, we could have fucked them in the dark ten times, and had enough change to get back to Base — that they lost any appeal they might have had. What he’d meant to be old-fashioned revelry became a quiet mean drunk. Not all his fault, though, I’m sure. The religious violence twisted all our faces like a cheap mirror.
Toni had to flitter about the table seeking compliments, snatching feels, his soft hands patting shoulders, his tired voice pleading for good opinion. Surly as we were, we weren’t even polite. “Okay, if you like shit,” Quinn said. “You should love it,” Morning said, and Quinn answered, “I’d rather eat shit than cocks,” then they both stood up. But I, with my love for the dramatic moment, hurled a beer bottle between them and it exploded on the wall behind. I told them to sit, and they did. God knows why; ordinarily I couldn’t get either one of them to do anything. Maybe they thought I was going to kill them; they might have been right. But the winds blew again, quickly.
Toni squeezed Novotny’s arm once too often, too lovingly. He stood up and hit Toni full in the face with such a painfully happy smile, I had to answer it. But Morning came around the table swinging, and there was a brief moment of fists glancing from hard faces and skulls, bouncing off shoulders and tensed arms; but only a brief moment, then I plunged between them like a fullback making his own hole. Morning fell against the table, scrambled, then the table collapsed. He fell among broken dishes and spilled drinks on the floor. Novotny had stumbled over Toni’s inert body, and fallen also. As I turned, I grabbed a heavy oak chair from under Peterson, and said with a smile:
“You boys stay down, or I’ll bust you wide open. Either one, or both. No matter.”
Novotny was willing; he was already ashamed. Morning was less willing, but no less ashamed, so he stood up, shook his head, made a vague gesture with his arms, then walked quickly out. He had a glob of mustard hanging from one haunch, beer sloshing in one shoe, and baked potato in his hair. A ruined exit.
I held the chair cocked, and felt for an instant the crushing need to demolish something, but paused in soldierly soberness, and lowered the chair. “Fuck it,” Haddad said. I threw the chair through the French doors which led to the small balcony. A great lovely crash as doors and glass and chair plunged to the ground outside. Haddad was smiling when I looked at him.
“Is it deductible?” I asked.
“The fucking world is deductible, Krummel,” he answered, then threw his chair toward the open windows. It hung in the drapes, but he ran over, grinning as if he had just cut costs ten percent, rubbing his hands like a Jewish pawnbroker, and tore down the drapes, wadded them in the chair, then heaved the mess away from him. The troops were right behind him.
In a mad flurry of laughter, everything in the room flew out the window in less than a minute: table, chairs, table cloth filled with stale food and dishes, a brocaded settee, a rattan couch. It made no sense, but it was great fun. Collins grabbed what steak knives he could, then tried to stick them into the papaya tree. Quinn tried to throw a still inert Toni out, but reason prevailed, for a moment. Later we discovered that he had rolled Toni up in the carpet and heaved him into the papaya tree. Only his feelings were hurt. He never came around us after Good Friday.
When the room was bare, absolutely bare except for the whores huddled against a bare wall, hoping we wouldn’t throw them out, someone, Quinn I think, began tearing his clothes off and throwing them out the window, sailing them into the night wind. The troops followed. (I tell this as if I were not there out of a natural sense of modesty.) In a moment, nine mad soldiers sat their bare cold butts on the tile floor and drank beer with six much more at ease whores. Laughter and drinking and one thing led to another. The only moment of any note to anyone but ourselves came as drunk Cagle fucked a small middle-aged whore on the floor. He would poke her, she would slide, he would crawl after her and poke her again, and she would slide away again. Around the floor they went, two complete circuits before he cornered her, lodged her head against a baseboard and, in finishing her off, nearly knocked her brains out. Everyone in action took a smoke break to watch this new pornographic position. We called it the Cagle Crawling Fuck, or How to Get Scraped Knees While Falling in Love.
The destruction of the room had cleansed us of hate and fear and pretense, had left us only laughter and our bare skins, more than enough for salvation. We died i
n violence, but were resurrected in laughter.
Downstairs, after the party was over, we found Morning slumped against a plaster column, one arm around the chipping evidence of more ornate days, one hand clutching an empty bottle of TDY rum. Infirm, blind, perhaps even dead, someone suggested. We sacked his slack body behind a couch, out of Air Police sight, then settled in, since it was still quite early, for, as Quinn said, more and more serious drinking. Not that we were sullen, but that we just drank all the time anyway. We understood it was an evil poison, causing madness more often than not, but it was our way through the mask, and nothing else seemed as appropriate.
But other winds were blowing…
Over in the 9th ASA the mood must have been just about the same as ours. The troops had planned a company roll call for the Saturday night after Good Friday. Not a Trick Roll Call, which was bad enough (bird colonels had strokes etc.), but a Company Roll Call with over three hundred men signed up, solemnly pledged to take part in the Roll Call, Riot, and General Disorder. The company officers, sly as officers often manage to be, had broken wind of the event and planned, secretly, to close the pass box Saturday morning. But the foxes smelled the dogs’ shit, and moved the roll call to Friday night. Thus, in a very direct way, the Good Friday Night Riot was caused by the officers, sly devils, of the 9th ASA, and in an indirect way by Joe Morning, professional innocent.