But a shadowed voice, then a cackle of laughter intruded from the unfamiliar darkness, and in the pale candlelight, a hunched, headless shape fumbled at the curtain. I raced, oh I raced from the snow, down, down across the hills to the rotting, mucking jungle again, and a bitter scream escaped the aching teeth of my mouth, and I launched myself at the shape of my enemy, fell, jerked up my pants, then lunged again.
The door ripped away, and I clubbed at the figure. We grappled and rolled, bumping down the slanted hall, the blood thick in my ears, then rolled down the steps to the darkened floor. The whack of my fist in his chest (I never thought he had a head I might hit) threw him back, and in the light from Novotny's candle I saw Joe Morning sprawled like a bug squashed on the wall.
As Novotny explained that David had slipped away and cut off the lights, I clutched my crotch, moaning a thousand times. The pulsating mountain I reached for wasn't even a slightly quivering molehill, but a bag of ashes in my hand. The snows had melted, running into mysterious underground rivers, and however cold they might flood, they would not be the snow again for a long weary cycle of time.
Then Teresita was there, her slacks on backwards, a convexo-convex bit of pale brown flesh winking from the hastily clutched zipper, explaining to the police who promised to lock up David until his father returned. It seemed they had to do this every time his father went away.
So wan and tipsy and aching I gathered Trick Two, herded them to the bus, then said goodbye to Teresita.
"I'm sorry. Jesus Christ, I'm sorry."
"Yes. I too," she said, "as much as you. I will come to the beach tomorrow and we will look again." She touched my face with a gentle hand; her lips were fleshless skin under mine.
As the bus bounced away from the haunted whorehouse, Morning shouted up to me, "Jesus-shit, Krummel, you nearly broke my back. What did you think I was, that Jap ghost?" He laughed.
"That's okay, Morning. You only fucked up a wet dream."
She did come the next day, and it was good walking in the still dawn far down the beach to make love beside the easy swells breaking like whispers. She rubbed my bruises and kissed them. We swam naked, our laughter bright across the sun-sparkled water as we frolicked like silly children. Her heavy breasts scrambled in the water like puppies, their soft, wet noses nuzzling my chest. Once she lay on the beach as I swam far out, and when I came back, I almost cried at the beauty: the black gleaming span of her hair against the glare of the sand, the sweet melting brown of her body, the waiting blue of the sea, a rippled shower draping the mountains in a shimmering veil. I was naked man first flung from the sea, crouched humble over the sleeping paradise of woman. But pride, not of possessing her or the world but of simply and foolishly being a man, made me rise and look to the green mountains and across the faraway sweep of the sea… what for, my God, for what?
Later we watched the chameleon in my hut, then had a sweaty slide at love, and afterwards strolled the cooling sand as great rolling clouds piled up the horizon. When we said goodbye, we knew it was. (Though, of course, it wasn't at all.)
During the trip back to Clark, Morning inquired as to where I had been going when I bumped into him the night before.
"Looking for running room, mother," I answered. His face was hidden in the rattling darkness, but he was smiling.
8. Manila
Oh, if the comedy were only divine.
I, of course, select things to leave you with, but I must try to tell the truth, too. How nice if you retained, say, a picture of Slag Krummel swinging like a pagan, rioting, raping, lusting all over the place, or perhaps even Jacob Krummel, naked above nakedness, on a primeval beach, contemplating original sin as his woman beautifully sleeps. But, no, you'll remember the way Morning made my voice vulgar in the darkness: You only fucked up a wet dream.
I have so few illusions; he robs me even of those.
But, by god, I'm having the last word here (which may be why I'm having any word at all), and if you are going to persist, and you will persist, you bastard, you will even endure, in remembering me stumbling across that darkened room, torn from the greatest fuck of the decade, my pants heaped around my ankles like a burlesque comedian, then I will also joggle your memory, aptly, of course. Whatever sort of harmless fool I played, it wasn't me courting madness across that drunken lagoon, dancing with sweaty, sad Billy Boys, their make-up running off their eyes like cheap dolls left in the rain, it was that devil-may-care Morning. In his case the devil does care; Morning had an awful attraction to self-destruction, moral, physical, sexual.
I say this so you will remember that he did interrupt me. How odd, how odd the sexual connections we make. We all sleep in a circle.
Abigail kissed me this morning and I cupped a tiny breast fluttering like a baby chick in my hand. I strain in my bonds. Morning interrupts me again. I interrupt myself. Time is the interruption of space, or is it space, the interruption of time.
How silly I'm getting in my old age. How silly.
After Dagupan a strange uneasiness captured me. So much, so fast. The raid, then touching Teresita, and quickly now snips of rumor that the 721st might go to Vietnam, a persistent and persistently ignored rumor for the past months. I was ready to believe it, ready to go, ready for anything, I thought. I began staying apart from the Trick, spending my breaks and all my money in Manila. I soon squandered my savings. Teresita was lovely, long, and sweet, her body strong under placid skin, her pubic hair silken and straight, her love satisfying, and expensive. Moving once again away from commitments, as I had when I reenlisted, I made her take money for her love, made her eat the bitter grass. And when the money was gone, I wouldn't go to Manila. This is not counting the seven hundred or so I'd won on the long restriction. Not a penny of it had been spent or even touched, but it abided in the form of figures in my savings book. A reserve, but for what I wasn't sure. Morning had been after me since the restriction to let him use the money to ease us into the black market. My capital, his contacts, and he guaranteed to double it within the month, but I wouldn't turn it loose. Not saying anything derogatory about Haddad, mind you, I just didn't fancy myself as a black market czar. Enough money for my woman, my beer gut, and me.
Haddad had really done well on the market. He was well-suited to the business of business, generally no better or no worse than the average American businessman, and probably better educated than most. He wouldn't cheat his friends; he was at least a political liberal, though economically he was of the buyer-beware school; and he was the only person I'd ever known who had read all of Proust. I think that may be the secret to his soul. He would work hard, and he saw the making of money the art one prepares his life for. God, he loved to make money, not for what it would buy, nor for power, but just for money. Plus he had imagination; and he never cheated me. If I could have convinced him to play the profit game, keep enough to live on and play again, and give the rest away, he would have been a better sort. But he said, very seriously, that the tax structure was such that… well, you know. But he was free with his money and when success laid half-ownership of a bar in Town in his hands, he planned an opening night party for the Trick. It was really a fine bar, an old Spanish home, two stories, set on half an acre of grounds, and it would have been a fine party… but it was Good Friday, April 12, 1963.