He seemed happy and harmless (he had a great ability to seem), so I left him alone. As I left, I heard him shout, "Overcome! You've heard of overkill? Well, this is Overcome! Sperm whales of the world, unite! We shall overcome!" Then laughter mixed with the spasmodic gurgle of vomit. Then: "And the angel of the Lord thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of God's wrath." I shook my head and walked back to Novotny's room.
If I had any questions as to the stability of the men of my trick after my encounter in the latrine, Novotny's room answered them. They were, to the man, crazy. They called it "going Asiatic." Six or seven drunks – they didn't stand for counting – packed the room like an overcrowded cage of underfed monkeys. They chattered, they laughed and shouted in high, tired voices, they snatched squatty brown bottles of San Miguel beer from a waterproof bag filled with ice and drank them in quick selfish gulps as if afraid they might be stolen before finished. I accepted the offered beer and sat on the bunk next to Novotny.
"There's a drunk crawling around the latrine," I said.
"Don't sweat it. That's Mornin' and he gets like that sometimes. He's our demonstrator and Freedom Fucker." He snipped off the ends of his words with the tight little grin of the night before.
"Well, he said he was all right. Except for his left mandible," I said, holding up my right hand.
"I don't give a shit who he calls it," shouted a small fellow suddenly dancing in front of me. "Don't care at all, just so he keeps decking them flyboys away. Deck 'em away, away!" he said, slamming a fist into his other hand, ignoring the beer he held. Foam sparkled in his heavy black eyebrows and beer ran down his cheeks. "Saved me from that airman, he did. Swept him off my back like a fly. Boom! Swish!" Another fountain of beer. "Might have killed me, mac," he said, holding his collar away from his tiny neck to expose six or eight blood-crusted scratches.
"Airman tried to give him a higher asshole with a rum bottle," Novotny explained casually. "Then Mornin' got the airman. That's what they're doing back so early. APs don't understand that sort of shit."
"Sgt. Krummel," Novotny added, thumbing at me.
"Cagle, mac," the small one said, holding out a hairy little hand.
"Caglemack?" I asked, shaking it.
"Just Cagle," he said, wrapping his whole tiny face around a cigar. He continued dancing like a doll on a string, a leg this way, an arm that, and all the while his black little moustache wriggled and squirmed as if trying to crawl off his upper lip into his mouth. "Boom!" he shouted, whirling to the other side of the room. "Swish! Fly, flyboy, fly!"
I listened to the recounting of the three days, the new fuck at so-and-so's, the arguments, Levenson's tumble into the creek – he was pointed out as the naked, dreamy one in the corner, nonchalantly nude – the fight again, Franklin's walk past a girl with the clap without catching another dose, and what a wonderful, awful Break it had been, hadn't it? Their frenzy increased with each beer. They asked more than three days could have: life, love, and happiness.
After a couple of beers I went back to check on Morning. He was sitting on the lip of the shower stall, leaning against the frame, and beating his head on the tile, singing again, but the song was too soft to hear.
"Hey, you need a hand?" I asked. He was hitting his head quite hard against the tile.
He stopped, but still sang. He sighed, and looked up calmly. He seemed tired, looked haggard. Just that second it came to me that he was not as drunk as he wanted me to think, but drunker than he realized.
"I didn't mean to kill my brother, you know," he said in a quiet, normal voice, a very collegiate voice which might have advertised fraternity blazers on the radio. "I didn't mean to." He had been crying.
"Sure, buddy, I know," I said, helping him to a sink. I ran cold water over his head for several minutes before he raised his face to the mirror. He stared at his reflection, then dried his glasses and said, "When I was a kid, I used to lay in bed after they made me turn the light off, used to lay there and make faces in the dark until I had one I thought was pretty good. Then I'd run to the bathroom and flip on the light to see it in the mirror." He paused, replaced his glasses – Army glasses with colorless rims which should have seemed out of place on his face, but they gave him a bemused, scholarly dignity – and looked at me. "Now I come down at night to make sure I'm not making a face, just to be sure." He shook the water off his hands, glanced once more into the mirror without expression, then walked slowly out.
Back in Novotny's room, another beer in hand, I told him what Morning had said about killing his brother.
"Ain't got no brothers. Just drunk again," he answered.
"Morning's my friend," Cagle chimed, "but he's a lousy fucking drunk sometimes."
"How do you know?" Novotny asked, his grin sly.
"What the hell you mean, 'How do you know?' " he answered, mimicking Novotny's clipped words and grin. "I've known him since basic, that's how I know."
"Bullshit," Novotny said calmly, challenging the world.
"What do you mean, 'bullshit!?' " Cagle's voice was high and shrill, and he stomped his foot. "Huh?"
"Never seen him drunk when you weren't too, you little hairy fart, so how the hell do you know how drunk he gets. And speaking of lousy drunks, who was it beat up that jukebox? and who can't go in the Tango anymore 'cause they don't pay for their beer? and just who the hell did the APs find under that Flip's house at three in the morning?"
"You never seen a woman so ugly. I couldn't believe that guy was really going to screw her, even if she was his wife. I had to see," Cagle said, smiling at the memory. "Didn't get written up, so fuck you, Navaho, and your pinto pony too."
"Keep away from my woman, piss ant," Novotny laughed and turned to me. "Ask the Beetle there," he said, pointing at Cagle, "how many times he's fallen on his fucking head and busted up an eyebrow. Everytime something hits the floor, everybody stands up and says, 'Okay, where's that fucking bug? Got to take him back and get his goddamned eyebrow stitched up again.' "
"There's a man knows a fine scar when he sees one," Cagle said, pointing at the four inch half-moon on my cheek. He showed me the crosshatching of thin white scars hidden in his brows. "How about…"
"Oughta take up a collection to buy the Beetle a crash helmet for drinking," Novotny interrupted.
As the hours passed I began to feel some responsibility as trick chief to get everyone to bed for a Little sleep before 0645. How should I play sergeant, I asked my beer bottle. An authoritative hint: "All right men, six o'clock comes pretty early!" A fawning plea: "Okay you guys, let's break it up, huh? Get a little beauty sleep, you know, ha, ha." Or a Listen-I'm-one-of-you-boys-and-I-hate-to-say-this-but-we-better-hit-the-sack sonnet. Perhaps just stand, flex my muscles, curl the ends of my moustache, and order, "Stop this shit." By the time I finally decided to hell with them and that their sleep was their business, the gathering ended as neatly and naturally as I could have hoped. The three-day frenzy was over for them, and the six-day drag just beginning. Letters they had meant to write, sleep they had hoped to catch up on, and last-Break resolutions never to go to Town again were all lost chances. Fatigue muffled their "Goodnight, shitheads" and fogged their red-rimmed eyes and wrapped around them like tattered old blankets.
From my bunk, as I had a final cigarette and the night breeze stroked me, I heard Morning's record player from across the hall. A high, thin female voice drifted easily around a guitar, sounding very small in the night.