"I never said anything about joining the Huks."
"You didn't have to," he said, taking off his glasses. He cleaned them slowly, then handed them to me. "There. I only need them to read, really, and I'm through with that, with reading and talking and thinking, I'm tired of all that. Give them to Gallard and tell him I'm sorry."
"Well, no sweat," I said, drinking and shaking it off, "they probably won't take you."
"They've already taken me. That's funny. Remember that old man you talked to at the wedding down at Blue Beach. He is a Huk. Sometimes you're pretty smart, Krummel, sometimes. Anyway, they'll use me as a pack-mule till they are convinced, and I will convince them."
"I don't doubt it," I sighed, "but I wonder how long you'll last."
"Long enough."
"Yeah. Think about this. You're not a soldier, Morning. Maybe you're tough and smart, but you don't know anything, you haven't…"
"I know as much as you knew," he interrupted.
I had to smile. "Maybe so. Shit, I don't know. I just hate to see you go."
"No other way for us," he said.
"What about your folks?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "It doesn't matter at all."
I stood, then wandered to the latrine, peed, wondering how I might stop him, but when I went back to the table, he was gone, the phony wheelchair sitting empty, his glasses gleaming from the tabletop. There was nothing to say. For an instant I wished that he had died in Vietnam, but I knew I didn't. I sat for a moment in the wheelchair, slipped on his glasses, and drank his beer, but it just didn't fit, so I drank my own.
Two, maybe three hours passed, and I thought nothing, said nothing, and drank very little. The Filipino, the student with the dirty mouth walked up to me, and in not an unfriendly voice said "Hello."
I hit him in the mouth and he tumbled backwards into the latrine.
I sat and the music and talk went on for perhaps fifteen seconds, then stopped. I took an easy drink of beer and when the student nearest behind me swung at the back of my head, I ducked, and elbowed him in the ribs. You could hear them break like a bow snapping. He lay on the floor, out of it, and I moved into the corner by the jukebox. There were seven of them, but only two miners, and they were all moving toward me, but I wasn't waiting.
I went for the nearest miner, catching half a dozen punches on my head and shoulders as I went. I had my neck tucked inside my chest and I wasn't waiting. I blocked the miner's roundhouse with a left and his foot with my knee, then hit him in the throat. As he went down, a wave of bodies hit my back, but I rolled as I fell, and came up with my back to the door. The other miner came first and I took two good shots to the forehead before I grabbed his arm and swung him out the door. He rolled over the hood of a car (and a taxi ran over his arm and the driver went for the police).
The bodies again flew at my back and forced me to the wall, but my foot came down on a shin with the edge of my shoe and I caught an inquisitive nose with the back of my head and smashed it like a tomato, and I rolled out again.
They had me in the middle now, swinging, kicking. I missed with a right, hit the top of a lowered head, and felt the bones give way. Kick one inside the thigh, miss another's kneecap, and fall under their hands and shoes. I know I was down and up at least twice, because I remember, and then there was just reeling darkness and spinning lights and sunbursts and darkness. Once, crouched against the bar, I felt broken glass under my hands and knees and wondered why it wasn't cutting. Then someone kicked my head against the bar and the black whirlwind fire blew again.
I came back as the sirens approached, but when I stood, the room tilted and I stumbled across the room to the far wall, then rolled back to the bar. The barroom looked like hell, furniture splintered, blood, glass, a tooth shining in a puddle of beer, an empty shoe under a broken table… I closed my eyes, reeled again, then opened them. I felt my face: nose, somehow, intact; a lump as big as my nose on my right cheek; a gap in my lip up through my moustache for my tongue to tiddle; teeth, traditionally strong, still there, but loose; another lump with the skin split across it like a splintered mirror; lumps on my head. Second and third knuckle of the right hand pushed halfway back to the wrist. Half an inch of my left ear disconnected from my head. Flesh on palms and knees sliced. Blood all over. In the mirror behind the bar, I looked as if I had already bled to death, but I was alive, and able to walk now.
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.
A MOST PERSONAL EPILOGUE
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…