I went to the Provost Marshal's Office and found a smart Dartmouth lawyer serving his time with a wry smile and a wonderful ability to beat courts-martial. I explained, with some slight exaggeration, Morning's plight, and within the hour he had called Dottlinger, quoted some legal, Latin nonsense to him (I think I overheard Illegitimi Non Carborundum; I hope so), and Dottlinger dropped the whole idea the same day. (Morning I saved, but incidentally loosed two more idiots on the world. One later made it to Leavenworth anyway, but the other went straight. Two out of three will get a fellow out of the Sally League any season.) Morning acted his part with mock sadness, I with mock humility; but he spoke to me again.
Football practice began the next week, Capt. Saunders came back the next, and we slogged on through the tail end of the rainy season, crazy about down-field blocks, gang-tackling, and mud.
It all seems important now, and there was so much more… a great football season, an undefeated team with Morning at quarterback and me running the defense, backing the line. A really fine season, a wonderful time, but I'm not sure what it might mean to you. Our last game – we had won the base championship the game before – we were quite drunk. Morning's passes faltered and tumbled like wounded ducks, and my defensive signals were at best unintelligible and more often confusing. During the last quarter we alternated between an eleven-man line and an eleven-man secondary. When first presented with an eleven-man secondary, the opposing quarterback left the field in disgust. But none of it mattered. Receivers – stretcher-bearers, I assume – appeared under Morning's sick passes; there was little need for defense since the other team not only couldn't hold the ball, they couldn't walk. The disgusted quarterback tripped on his way off the field; his receivers dropped seven passes in the end zone in the first half. And we couldn't do a thing wrong. Even I scored a touchdown on a two-yard plunge that Morning arranged for me. It was my first and really a thrill, except that I plunged through the end zone into the goal posts which shattered my shoulder pads and fractured my collar bone.
So I spent New Year's Eve 1962 in Baguio in a cast. I should have never let Morning call that play. I had to drink left-handed. Morning found a bar, The New Hollywood Star Bar. It was a real place because there was no icebox for the beer, no one put money in the jukebox but lifted the face and punched the songs they wanted, and the other patrons were Communists, students, and gold-miners, representing the labor and radical wings of the party. Morning played Trotsky to their Stalin and Mao, and they loved it. No one spoke to me because Morning told them I was a major when I was gone to the latrine the first night. Morning also fell in love at The New Hollywood Star Bar. The girl was real too, a short, stocky Benguet girl; young, pleasantly plump, with a square face and square hands and fingers, and best of all (as Morning told me seventy-two times that night) dirty fingernails. He had visions of sleeping with her in a tiny nipa hut, surrounded by jungle, washed by rain, devoured by her muscular body. But she wouldn't go the first night, and on the second she had cleaned her fingernails and wanted lady's drinks and a trip to the Club on John Hay. The first night she drank beer from heavy glasses, drank like a man with dirty fingernails. The second night he argued louder and longer with the Communists, and I had visions of fighting our way out, but nothing came of it. Later, in our room at the Club over a bottle of Dewar's he insisted that I tell him about my wife. Insisted in that drunken, persistent, arrogant way he had; his fist clenched except for the forefinger, which he held up with his thumb. "You need to talk about it, Krummel. You need to." He kept it up until I threatened to bust him even with one arm tied around me. He believed me, though, and let it go. But the next day he blew up at Cagle (who was a hell-and-back-again better golfer) on the golf course, and Cagle took after him with a four wood. Morning was stunned for a second, but then leapt down the fairway, Cagle two steps behind, and Novotny two steps behind him, leaving me collapsed in laughter on the tee and three very amazed caddies watching it all. Novotny caught Cagle and disarmed him, and while he sat on him, Morning apologized so contritely, so humbly that Cagle began to laugh, and when they came back up the fairway we were together again. They finished the eighteen holes in the rain as I tried to keep my cast from getting wet, all of us convinced that we were the four greatest guys alive. Then we feasted on two-inch thick sirloins, and drank cognac in our room until we were disgustingly maudlin, stupidly drunk, and God-ever-so happy; blind drunk and lost. We stood at the edge of the bluff in front of the Club in a windy, wet night, staring at the lights far down in the valley, looking up at the clouds so close. Wet and in the wind we were almost cold, chilled for the first time in months, and we savored it, warmed ourselves with cognac; but already in the wind, in the waning rain, came word of the long, hot dry season, a hint of dust, a touch of fear.
There is so much to tell, so much…
6. Raid
The morning the Huk bandits tried to rob the Central Exchange, my trick was on the last of a set of mids. The six mids had seemed like six months to me. It had been too hot too long. The work had long lost any magic for me. Even Town was too dreary to bear. Hot and dusty and dry. The manure dropping from calesa ponies raised small dust storms in the street, and the wet cakes dried before they could stink. It had been five months since Lt. Dottlinger had tried to take Town away from us, but we would have given it to him now.
At 0200 I telephoned the Flight Line, hoping that we had received courier mail on the 0100 flight from Travis, but there was nothing. I crossed a flying trip to the Flight Line with Cagle bulling the three-quarter all over the road from my list of possibilities to make the rest of the trick bearable. I wandered around the room several times, checking copy sheets, half-hoping Morning would start an argument or a word game or anything to pass the time. All the men were jabbering about the Trick's Break trip to the beach at Dagupan planned for the next three days, but I had heard about nothing else for the past week, and didn't want to hear any more. Back at my desk I wrote the 0300 entry in the log – something nonsensical, hoping for a laugh when it was read, but knowing no one ever read the damned thing anyway. The room and all its contents seemed to be turning gray. All the equipment, desks, chairs and consoles were already gray, and the faded green fatigues could have been gray in another light, and the cream walls were surely a shade of ashes. The same talk, the same faces. Without windows who could know if it was day or night outside? I might have been trapped in that square one-room building for months, even years, and not know it. The same work, the same non-work.