"What are you? an ape?" Cagle sneered, puffing on a huge cigar.
"Naw. What are you? a forest fart?"
"Ah, all you fucking Jews are the same," he answered, blowing smoke my way. "Have a gas attack, you…"
"Oh, no we're not," Levenson simpered at him, waving a limp wrist over the seat as the bus pulled out of the drive.
"Vhy, there hasn't been a single Jew in de same house mit a Slagsted-Krummel in twenty-five venerations."
"Nazi," Morning said. "Gary Cooper's queer."
"Genet isn't."
Et cetera.
It was a good morning. The air still held a trace of dew and a cool wind eased the fatigue left over from the night before. All faces bloomed, brown, bright, and happy, all voices bubbled. Even Franklin's acne was better. No one mentioned the raid, until Pete came out of his perpetual daze long enough to remark in a surprised voice, "Geez, somebody might have got killed last night. If we hadn't been on the roof. Geez."
No one spoke for several minutes, and then the bus was at the Main Gate. Filipino carpenters were already cleaning up the two piles of lumber which had been the sentry box and guard shack. Several gaping black circles marked where vehicles had burned. The Air Policemen who came aboard to check passes and search for black-market goods were quiet and methodical about their work, without any of the usual GI-airman banter, nor did they check as closely. Their faces showed the loss of friends, and ours the guilt of going out to play.
Every man on the Trick had a legal quart of Dewar's Scotch and one legal carton of Chesterfields in his AWOL bag. Twenty new classical records were stacked on a new portable record player. Everyone understood that these things were going to the market, but nothing could be done. The APs had to let the goods out the gate, since it only became criminal when you sold them, and no one, except fools and children, ever got caught in the act of selling. The big operators like Haddad paid certain Air Policemen a high tariff, so they weren't usually caught either. As the APs left the bus, one knocked over a K-ration carton. Morning jumped slightly, but let the AP pick it up. The gate routine was always unpleasant, and everyone was glad to get down the highway toward Tarlac.
Just past the nearby barrio of Dau, the driver turned on a dirt track which led behind a clump of banana trees.
"Where's he going?" I asked.
"Meet the man," Novotny answered.
"What man?"
"Breadman."
The bus halted beside a jeepny with two men in it. Packs of cigarettes suddenly appeared from socks and shirts. The top four K-rations were opened to reveal tobacco instead of food. Cartons were collected from under seats and hood and behind a false fire wall. It was a black-market Merry Christmas, and everyone streamed off the bus to barter with the breadman except Haddad and me. After the sale Morning collected expenses for the bus, driver and beer, then waving the pesos, shouted "Hallelujah" and passed out the beer.
North of Tarlac the bus swung left toward the Lingayan Gulf, sweeping past small barefoot boys attending lethargic water buffalo sprawled in the ditches like forgotten mounds of tar. The sun had burned all memory of the morning from the air, and we raced toward a glassy, shimmering haze as it in turn ran from us. The metal edge of the windows burned your arm when you propped it up to catch the hot breeze, and sweat ran in crazy rivers down your ribs. In a second the fatigue and beer would make you forget the hot window and your arm would slip back up, then be cursed and jerked back again. The beer was cold and biting in your throat, but not cold enough. Novotny's drunken voice buzzed in the heat; near, then far away in the drowsy haze.
"That was all right last night. After you got over being scared, it was all right." He sat easily in the bumping seat, his body loose and fluid with the swaying, jolting bus, while a perfect gyroscope balanced him. The beer in his bottle stirred, but the rest of us were busy wiping beer out of our faces. "Maybe we all need a couple of good wars for Christmas."
"Yeah, but what if somebody had gotten their ass shot off," Morning growled from across the aisle. "Wouldn't be quite so much fun then, would it?"
"Oh hell, there aren't any more good wars," I said. "Not since the cannon was invented and airplanes started firing on ground troops. No more. Now there's the bomb. How can a man enjoy a good war, if he knows there's a chance that some silly bastard who believes in things will push the funny button and wipe up the whole works. There's no sense in it any more."
"Fuck. There never was any sense in it. War is stupid. The most terrible thing man can do to himself," Morning said, leaning up.
"I don't know about that. A little war every now and again seems to put a bit of backbone in a people. They can't function as a people except during a war, and even if it's only a little bit more than usual, it is more."
"Man," Franklin laughed, "that's all you lifers do – wait for a war." A general chuckle followed.
"So what's a soldier for? To paint shitcans and file reports? All of you know how you hate being that kind of menial…"
"Maybe we'd hate being murderers too," Morning interrupted. "Anything is better than being a hired killer, anything, and that's all a soldier is. It seems to me," he continued, pinching air between his forefinger and thumb and shaking it at me, "that soldiers are nothing but dumb shits who don't know how to enjoy life so all they can dream of is a glorious Viking death. Whatever they've done or not done in their whole damned lives is okay if they die fighting. My God, Krummel, you've seen them; unhappy turds, either drunks or religious fanatics, waiting for a war. And if they had the chance and the power, they'd have one too. And someday when America goes Fascist, they'll have their war, and burn 70 million American Negroes when they start losing. Soldiers, ha, frustrated boy scouts and latent homosexuals."
"If they are, Morning, it's only because guys like you have made them that way with your believing in things, in thinking that men should fight not for power or money or lust but for ideas or gods which are the same thing. War is the human condition. It's natural for a man to want more than is his, and when he wants it badly enough, he'll kill to get it. That seems to me to be more sensible than fighting for ideas. People once recognized the warrior as the leader of his race, but now you think he must be a fool or a brute, and since it is you guys with your mouths open all the time, you even convince him that he is…"
"What other animal kills his own kind, but a foolish and brutal one?" Morning interrupted. Franklin started to make a joke, but stopped when he saw the anger in Morning's face.
"Any one that finds his kind, even his brother, in his way, encroaching on his territory or trying to steal his food or mate. Except that animals don't believe in right or wrong or unconditional surrender. Man's supposedly – and people like you have done all you can to convince him of it – only a higher animal, so maybe his sensitivity to encroachment is more highly developed and he kills for other kinds of assumed offenses. I don't know… there are a lot of things I don't know that maybe I'd learn in a war. How many novelists find war to be the most perfectly defined moment in their lives? How…"
"How many find it the last moment of their lives?"
"People die in car wrecks."
"I'm against them too."
"Christ, Morning, man has always been obsessed with murder. Maybe it answers questions. Maybe the killing gives you something holy. Maybe you find out about God then."
"It seems to me," he said, shaking that pedantic finger and thumb again, "that you're obsessed with murder. You got killing mixed up with screwing in that Puritan middle-class mind of yours." He laughed harshly. "Man, it is wrong for one man to kill another man. Don't you understand that."