"I'm tired of you bitching all the time. I put up the money; you run the operation; that was our deal." I sat up to open the last beer.
"Krummel, you and your…" he said as he turned, "… commitment shit.
"Well, fuck, take the last fucking beer, too, why don't you?" he spat at me.
"Eat shit," I said, and left.
The Golden Cave, in spite of its name and reputation, was a rather ordinary looking place, a two-story house hidden behind a stucco wall in a residential section. The grounds were nice, and the large banyan trees kept the noise from disturbing the neighbors; best of all, though, were the girls and the central air conditioning; they commanded a price. It was run by a small sad man, an ex-priest, a homosexual who was writing a book which, he said, would give the homosexual a place in heaven, if not next to God, at least near the more compassionate Jesus Christ. I often drank with him while waiting for Terri to finish with a customer upstairs. He was good company, never pushy, and he ran a good, tight bar and whorehouse. But he was still unhappy about being disrobed by the Church. It seems he often used the confessional for more than a place to talk. He had knocked all the walls out of the lower floor. The low ceiling gave the place the intimacy of a home, the big room, the freedom of a house.
Terri was having a drink at the tables back near the bar with a fat, somehow familiar man when I finally drank my way to the Cave that long afternoon. She saw that I was more than a bit drunk, and her eyes tried to wave me past the table, but I was in no mood to be waved off. I walked past, then peeled back behind her to put my hand on her neck. She smiled, frightened; her partner frowned, disturbed, and I answered both. She introduced him as a Mr. Alfrado Garcia, the owner of several bars and houses down by the stockyards in Pasay City, a section where a night on the town usually included waking up naked and half dead in one of the blood gutters the next morning. A big, fat man, his eyes almost in the back of his head, a greasy smile like a dimple in his face. Was I that fat already? I asked myself. Of course not.
"Garcia," I said. "A Spanish name, huh? You don't look Spanish."
"I know we haven't been introduced yet," he said, ignoring my insult, "but I do know you." His voice sounded like a sulphur bubble rising in a mud pit, or like cow shit falling on a hot rock, and his face contorted in a jolly fake of a smile.
"Yeah," I said, walking behind the bar for a beer, "I know you, too. Next time don't bet against winners." He was the guy who had dropped several thousand pesos against my thirteen straight passes at the Key Club back during the long Coke bottle restriction. Terri followed me, got two beers for them, and when her back was to Mr. Garcia, her mouth formed "No, Jake, baby." I acted as if I hadn't heard.
"I usually don't," he said. "That's why I'm rich today. I usually don't. But perhaps if you had made one more pass… perhaps."
"But I didn't. The wise man knows when to quit. It's better to be wise than rich," I said, sitting.
"Exactly as I would have said," he chuckled. "The wise know when they are beat." He reached across the table to pat Terri's right breast. "Yes."
I should have killed him then, but I said, "That's not what I said."
"How is it that a sergeant can live so high?" he asked, the sick dimple sinking again between his fat cheeks. "Perhaps the black market? Now, I have some connections. One could eliminate the middle man. Chesterfields might bring twelve-fifty, perhaps thirteen pesos a carton. Something to think about."
"You can buy her, if you can, jack, but I'm not for sale," I sneered. Terri flinched, but said nothing.
"I didn't mean…" he started.
"We both know what you meant. What you pay for, fat man, I get for love." Which wasn't quite true, but it could have been.
"He who loves a whore would sleep with his mother," he said, calmly.
I assumed he had a pistol in his back pocket under the baggy barong tagalog he wore.
Heat forced its way from my guts to my neck, but I only said, "At least one who sleeps with his mother has one. One can't sleep with a monkey, then call the offspring Garcia."
He tried to stand, but I pushed the table into him, then rolled it over him, and when he got his hands free from table and chairs tumbling on him and reached for his back, I kicked him in the stomach. His hands came back, but he tried to kick at me lying on his side. I kicked him on the inside of his thigh, then, when he moved his hands, kicked him in the stomach twice more, then leaned over to get the pistol. He waved a feeble punch at my head, but I chopped the inside of his arm, and he quit. I took the gun, an old pearl-handled.38 automatic, threw the bolt, chambering a round and cocking it. Terri stood out of the way, crying, saying, "No, Jake," over and over. Holding the gun in my left hand, I stood over him until he tried to sit up, mumbling curses and threats. I chopped him above the ear. His jaw fell open on that side, and he stopped even trying to talk, but lay back down again.
"Get up, you fat mother-fucker," I said. "You lay there, I'm gonna shoot you in the guts, then drop you in the bay. Right there," I said, and kicked him again. A line of spittle and puke crept out the side of his mouth. He was finally afraid now. "Okay, fat boy, I'm going to let you go now. But I want you to remember something." I had learned enough about Manila minor gangster operations from the ex-priest to carry this off. "Remember Mr. Taruc at the Yellow Bar. Remember how he liked to knock soldiers in the head, then drop them in the blood gutters. Remember. You will also remember that last month someone shot Mr. Taruc's legs off with a Thompson as he stepped out his bar door. Remember that. But he wasn't dead. Two Molotov cocktails did that. Did you hear how he burned, did they tell you what color the flames were, did they tell you how he smelled? I know, fat boy – he was fat too wasn't he – I know because I did it. Mr. Taruc doesn't knock American soldiers in the head any more, does he? My sergeant and I stopped that. Remember you're fat, you'd burn well too." I went on, mixing up a story Tetrick had told me about a real incident in India after the war with the late lamented demise of Mr. Taruc. I think he finally believed me. Worst of all, I think Terri started to believe me. Mr. Garcia left, wobbling like a man after a bad accident, leaving me to clean up my own mess behind him.
"Why you do that?" Terri asked, as I got a beer. "Why?"
Everything spilled out at once. "Why? You want to know why? The weather, the Army, my screwed up life. You want to know something worth knowing, ask me why I didn't kill him. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to blow his fat, ugly guts all over the bar. But I didn't. Sometimes I get unhappy. Sometimes life is too much. Why? Why? I don't know why." I spoke mostly to my beer bottle, then took a long cool drink from it.
"You sound like Joe Morning," she said, seemingly far behind me. "Most time you are gentle man, Jake, but today you have kill in your heart. I sorry for you." She was crying; I could tell without looking around. I'd heard the sound before. "He offer me one thousand pesos a month to live with him," she said. "I am. Goodbye." She walked out after Mr. Garcia, but stopped at the door. "Maybe I keep him from having you killed," she said.
"You've been seeing to many American movies," I said without looking up.
She went on into the afternoon sunlight wearing the same black pants, the same black jersey, the same lovely bare feet soft in the grass. And I knew exactly how her breasts rippled under the jersey, knew exactly the animal smell of her body, satin skin over a cat's muscles, the way her legs climbed my body when she really wanted me, the night rain of kisses after she came. She was right, I thought, but I couldn't help thinking, What if I'd let him kick the shit out of me? Would she have stayed? No matter. It died aborning, conceived in violence, buried in hate, how could it be love? Once more Krummel loses to a loser. How fucking quaint.