"The next guy said he didn't have time because his mother expected him to go to Training Union down at the Baptist Church with her. So it looked like that little ole gal wasn't ever going to get screwed. Then up steps old Joseph Savior Morning, screaming drunk, ripping off his pants out of turn, promising that poor white-trash girl some real welfare meat and potatoes. I, also somewhat of a lover, tried to warm her up with my hand, warm her up for a gang-bang, shit, but she was so drunk it didn't matter, so I went ahead without her. Till she started puking. I'd poke her, and she'd puke, like poking a sack of chicken feed with a hole in the other end. She wouldn't quit, so I got mad, they told me, and got off. Then I saw the blood. It covered me from belly to knees, all over my hands. Everybody was laughing and I thought they had played a joke on me, but then I tore the rest of my clothes off, and started washing off the blood with beer and throwing handfuls on her and shouting verses from Leviticus that I just happened to know, 'And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And everything that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: everything also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.' And then, they said, I shouted the last verse and held her head under the spout, 'And if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and the bed whereon he lieth shall be unclean!' Well, dad, I was well-flowered, to say the least, twice drunk, and everybody else sort of went insane with me, throwing beer on each other and everything." He paused – to think? to remember?
In the short quiet I noticed that the rain had stopped. Morning sat now arms about his knees, the blanket draped over his head, light from a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth exposing half a face perhaps as thin and tired in the shadow as Rita's must have been, trapped in the back of a pickup with a madman. Darkness hid the other half of his face, as if he were a leper hiding his sores from the Lord thy God. He went on in a slow, measured voice.
"We tied Rita naked to a sour persimmon tree next to the fire and danced and screamed and laughed – everyone joined me, no one tried to stop me – and washed away her blood with beer and rough hands. But I didn't stop there, they tell me, but grabbed the fat girls and had them stripped, shouting like a nigger preacher because they were wearing slacks, The man shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a woman, neither shall a woman put on a man's clothes: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God!'
"Deuteronomy 22:5," he said to me with a sad smile. "I always remember the good parts.
"Then somehow all of us were naked and washing the girls and slapping the fat girls' titties and rubbing them until they cried. Then my best friend, the one I'd already fought with, tried to screw one of the fat girls standing up. Somehow in the back of my mind I must have remembered that he had lost a nut when he was a baby. He had told me not to tell anybody; he was afraid we would laugh at him. Yes, count on me, I probably said to him. We tied him to the tree with the other sinners to the tune of Deuteronomy 23:1, 'He that is wounded in his stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.' A photographic memory, a miracle my teachers called it. He wasn't as easy to hog-tie as the girls, but nine of us managed.
"I woke a couple of hours later when it started to rain, and in the flickering firelight saw – well, let me say, real abominations. Seven kinds of sodomy at once. The scene made my stereo cabinet look like a Victorian play by comparison. The farm brothers had finally lost their cherry, in a way, and my best friend also lost any illusions he might have had about clean, healthy American farm boys. I untied him from the back of the pickup where they had carried him, and he and I fought again, and I let him whip me. But it didn't help. He always acted as if I'd done it instead of the farmers. Anyway, he never spoke to me again.
"It might make a good story to say that he killed himself or ran away or something, but right now he's selling insurance in Charleston, and if you asked him about that night, he wouldn't remember, either.
"Somehow we all got home without permanent damage, but it took a long time for me to believe what they said I'd done. I tried to ask Rita for a date, as a way of apology, but she told me to go fuck myself, '… or maybe your best buddy, huh?' God, what a night. Too much. And half a dozen times just like that since then." He stopped, shook his head, then rested it on his arms.
"You never remember anything?"
He looked up at me quickly, almost as if he were disgusted with even the idea, but then laid his forehead back down, mumbling something.
"What?"
"I said, 'Of course, I remember,' you asshole."
"Yeah," I said.
"Everytime. Shit, I remember even better drunk than sober. Remember everything. I just can't stop myself, at all. Just like that night. I remember those delicious fat titties, wet and stinking of beer. I wallowed in flesh, then whetted myself on bone, bony thin Rita, and I saw what those dumb farmers were doing to Jack. And I cheered them on. I knew what I was doing, but I just couldn't stop. I guess I didn't even want to stop. And then I always lied that I didn't remember. Ashamed, I guess. Like tonight. Shit," he said, "I don't know what's wrong with me." He seemed near tears. I didn't want to see him cry.
"Don't you know that's what being drunk is, Joe?" I said. "Don't you know?"
"What?" he said, half angry, perhaps at the simple answer.
"To be drunk is to be out of control. Sometimes the good part of a man gets out of the cage, sometimes the bad, man. Didn't you know that?" I tried to explain, to sooth, but he was too long convinced of his guilt, irrevocable guilt. Though we talked till daylight, gray morning, mist, and fog; I could still see the sadness deep in his dull, red-cracked eyes. Understanding, slow yet as sure as the sun slaying the mist, crept heavily into me… and I resolved, in spite of himself, in spite of myself, to save him.
I fell to conniving that morning. First I tried Tetrick.
"No," he said, when I asked him to speak to Dottlinger again about Morning's discharge. "No. And don't you. After that stunt the other night, after last night – yeah, I heard about last night – he's hanging himself."
"Maybe that's why we should help?"
"I've got seventy-five other men to help, men who don't give me trouble all the time. You got nine other men, and Morning is going to get his shit on them one of these times. I'm sorry that he has to go this way, but I'm not sorry to see him go. He's been trouble from the beginning. The first night he's in the Company, I go to Town and find him in Esting's, and he smiles at me and says 'Hi, sarge,' as if I hadn't told him that same morning that he couldn't go to Town for fifteen days. I still haven't found out how he got off base. Even I spent fifteen days on base before I got a pass. But not him. Rules are for other guys, not him. I won't miss him. Neither will you. He's already got you in crap once. He'll do it again. He's not worth the effort; he'll turn on you. He's not." Tetrick punctuated his "he's not's" by slapping his bald head and stomping his feet under the desk. "Ahh," he groaned. "This damned rain is killing my feet."