"Ah, 'tis Daemon Rum his-self," I answered.
Shortly, he came in, more tired than drunk, face sunburnt and drawn, but his eyes glittered like glass ornaments. The bow of his short-timer's ribbon, untied, drooped like a pennant in the rain.
I asked why he was back, suspecting the worst.
"Just tired," he said, fooling me again, rubbing the stubble of beard. "I been sweatin'… sitting in a swing all day. Talkin', talkin' to a sweet little girl."
"You found a new way," I grunted, doing my first set of squats.
"No, man, really, a little girl. Bow-legged Dottie's little girl. Went over with Quinn to fence some records for… so Dottie could. Anyway, he had to screw her first, and they made me take the kid out to the swing, you know, one of those old-fashioned bench swings." He sat heavily on the edge of the mat, then flopped back, an arm covering his eyes. "So, man, I spent all morning popping bennies and drinking beer while Quinn was farting around. Then he and Dottie went off to sell the stuff and made me stay with the kid, but by then I wouldn't have left for anything. Great kid, lotsa bennies, and the kid would run to the sari-sari store for beer. She fixed us lunch, like a party. Beautiful lunch. First time I ever noticed how pretty food is. Tomatoes about the size of your thumb, tiny little red things; white rice, as white as the sun; little bitty raw fish, churds, or chaps or something, little gray devils; and those great little bananas sort of hovering between green and yellow. Hey, man, one of the bananas was a twin, you know, two bananas in one skin. Dottie's kid said that's the best kinda luck, twin bananas. She said if we ate them, the two of us, we would get married, and I said she didn't want to marry me 'cause I was no good, and she said she did want to marry me 'cause I was so sad. Ain't that great, man. So sad. Jesus Christ, what a kid. Nine years old, man, and she knows more about life than Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, and your fucking Edmund Burke all thrown together in Archimedes' bathtub." He laughed and sat up. "Hey, man, you ever see how silly you look doing squats. You look like the most constipated man in the world." He laughed again.
I finished the squats and put the weights up. "So go on. You got Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine and my fucking Edmund Burke in Archimedes' tub singing 'Im Forever Blowing Stinky Bubbles in the Tub.' "
"No, man, Plato don't allow no singing. Aristotle ain't singing, it ain't in the plan; he's just sitting there farting and bitin' the bubbles when they come up and calling it a catharsis. Ca-fucking-tharsis! Augustine is trying to hide a hard-on, and Edmund Burke is casting a baleful eye on the whole proceedings, wishing he had a hard-on," he crowed, "and Archimedes run off with a belly-dancer from Bayonne, New Jersey, who promised to teach him about spirals and specific gravity and the Archimedean screw."
"Maybe you shouldn't drink so much," I said.
"Maybe I should drink more," he answered. "Particularly with lovely, sweet little girls. 'Joe Morning,' she said when I left, 'How come you GIs all-a-time drunk?' I think I love her."
"Yes, Pfc Morning, we've noted your interest in the younger members of opposite sex," I said, mocking Dottlinger's dry whine. In my own voice, I asked, "How many packages of gum did she sell you?" Dottie's kid was one of the better con artists among the horde of gum and flower girls with bare feet and scraggly hair who were constantly in bars, day in day out, constant reminders of poverty and want, a constant whine at your sleeve, "You buy gum, joe?"
Morning was silent for a second, then said, "You don't believe in shit do you? Well, fuck you, golden-hearted cynic."
"Don't sweat me, jack; I won't be sitting on the board. They can't make me tell about that twelve-year-old girl in Chew Chi's hotel – at least she said she was twelve, didn't she?" The night I had shared that black, rat-ridden room with the old woman, my first night in Town, digging, as it were, into the past, Morning had asked Dominic for something young and tender, and received, he discovered the next morning, a twelve-year-old girl in a red crepe-paper party dress with clumsy white valentine hearts stitched around the skirt.
"I was drunk."
"You're drunk now. Don't snarl at me just because Dottlinger is after your ass. You made your own bed," I said. (God, he could make me angry, and I, him.) "You didn't tell me how much gum she stuck you with."
A sleepy grin wavered about his eyes as he emptied the pockets of the baggy light-blue pants he wore to Town. "I ain't counted 'em, yet." He smiled. Twenty-six shiny green packages of Doublemint. "It was worth it; I love her. I think I love her."
"I think you ought to go to bed."
"No, sir. Benzedrine and sex don't mix."
"To sleep."
"I can't sleep; I'm too tired." He paused, fingered his ribbon. "I'm too short to sleep; might miss my plane."
"Don't sweat that. You can beat this thing," I said. "Easy."
"Shit, man, you ought to read Slutfinger's instructions to the board. 'Subjects may show superficial intelligence and verbal ability, and attempt to make philosophical justification for immorality, but the board must keep the good of the service in mind rather than some vague good-of-man ideal that allows certain types of immorality, usually sexual, as long as the higher principles are followed. The board must remember that immorality is immorality.' God, he loved reading it to me. I think he wrote it for me. Jesus, he's crazy. It's not me he's putting out of the army 'for the good of the service,' it's the whole twentieth century. Morning, Joseph J., unsuitable, sir, for duty in the service of God and Country because of a lewd and lascivious character established by the prima-facie evidence of three contractions of the vile disease of gonorrhea, an article fifteen company punishment for being caught off-limits in one of the most notorious dens of prostitution in the whole Philippines, if not the whole world, naked and, we can assume, having had subjected himself to carnal intercourse with these low women, and keeping constant company with a reputed pander and black-marketeer and an admitted homosexual, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera."
"Did he say all that."
"No, but he will. He wants to, but he can't spell all the words." He stood up, walked to the screen, leaving a trail of dirty footprints across the canvas mat. "He's gonna have my ass, like you said, one way or the other. Who gives a shit, really? They can't hurt me."
"You can beat it. I'll testify, Tetrick will, maybe even Capt. Harry if we push him."
"I'm not going to try. I'm tired, man. I told you that. I want to get out of this fucking, stupid, dirty country and the dumb goddamned army. I'm going back to the States." He leaned his forehead against the screen. "Home for a while, then maybe back to Phoenix, maybe back to school…"
"Not this way, for Christ's sake." I picked up a dumbbell and began doing one-handed curls. "We can beat it."
"… maybe Mississippi. I've got a friend with SNCC there." He mumbled on, but I wasn't listening.
"Ellen's in Mississippi," I said absently. Mississippi looked as if it were going to once again take its toll on me. First Ellen and Ron Fowlers, now Joe Morning, I thought. Then an odd picture intruded, Joe and Ellen in bed. Somehow I knew if they met, and in Mississippi they must, she would fuck him with all that wonderful, religious, rebellious ardor she once spread for me. After long nights of talk, she had to have me, as if the words caressed her, a long flickering tongue of talk, and have me she did, a mount and a sudden charge. Even now the stale cigarette breath ripened by cheap beer, the dry lips, the sticky tongue, the hot, hot breath of a woman talking close and intense in your face… I was suddenly sorry I hadn't gone with her to Mississippi that summer; but no – she had said, love me, love my cause – no, I said. But that pale hot face, pale mouth cuddling like a sleepy kitten against mine… "Huh?" I said as Morning poked me. My arm still curled absent mindedly, the muscles tight and hard and bitter now. "What?"