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"Let's stay straight, buddy. You swung at me before I could say hello. You just made a mistake. You should have stayed out of it like your pal here. So shut your mouth before you make two mistakes in one night. Next time I see you all, I'll buy the beer. And tell the other guy to watch where the hell he's walking. Okay? Okay."
"Okay," they said in chorus.
I caught up with Morning and Cagle. Morning was chuckling quietly.
"You guys through yet," Cagle muttered.
"Set them straight?" Morning asked, gri
"Maybe they won't cut us off at the pass."
"Piss on 'em."
"You're pretty good for a passive resister, Morning."
"That's why I'm here. I took crap from rednecks as long as I could, then one spit in my face one hungover morning at a lunch counter in Birmingham. I dropped his peckerwood ass." He took a plate of four teeth out of the left side of his mouth and showed it to me. "But his gentlemen buddies got me. Damnit, I forgot to take this damned thing out," he mumbled, putting it back in. "Someday I'm going to take a shot in the gut and choke on my plastic teeth." He laughed. "How'd you like to try to swallow that monster of Qui
We were on the highway now and the quiet whiz of the tires, the cool wind and the receding lights of Town made the fight seem far away. As we swept past the Cloud 9, a wild burst of laughter shot out to meet us, mocking my thoughts.
"You're pretty salty yourself," he said.
"I'm out of practice, Morning, and intend to stay that way. The next time you tee-off on a guy just because you're pissed at a broad, count me out."
"Bullshit," he said, smiling again, stretching his arms and popping his knuckles. "So I was pissed off. What's your excuse?"
"With you on the Trick, my stripes aren't worth a rusty razor blade."
"Not me, man. I don't rock the boat." He flipped his cigarette away and it flashed past me in a streaking red line, then sparkled the road like the fuse of a firecracker. He rubbed his hands greedily together, savoring the heat of violence. As I noticed him, I caught my own hand cradling my right fist, remembering the solid clunk it had made against the airman's ribs. My wrist would hurt the next morning, but not very much. No more than Morning's hands.
4. SMACKS
Tetrick's admonition to step easily with Lt. Dottlinger commanding the Company proved all too correct. During the set of days after my lengthy initiation into the seminal rites of Town, a small incident, the breaking of four cases of bottles, touched off the events known as The Great Coke Bottle Mystery, or Slag Krummel Rides, Howsoever Badly, Again.
It was a Wednesday or Thursday morning – without the limits of an established weekend period of rest, we seldom knew the day of the week. Lt. Dottlinger always checked the Day Room first thing each morning. He counted the pool cues and balls, and the shuffleboard pucks, examined the felt of the pool tables for new nicks or tears, and made sure the Coke machine was full. These things were nominally his responsibility since the equipment had been purchased from the Company Fund and the Coke machine was a concession of the Fund. All seemed well until he felt a bit of glass crunch under his spit-shined shoe. He picked it up, and found it to be the lip ring off the rim of a bottle. He knew the trick: two rims hooked together, then jerk, and a neat little ring of glass pops off one or both. He didn't see any others at first, but when he examined the trash in the houseboy's dust bucket, he found dozens of rings. Also, he noted, there were hundreds of cigarette butts, in spite of his standing orders against extinguishing them on the Day Room floor. He checked the four cases of empties. All except for one had been broken. Dottlinger took the dust bucket and dumped its contents in a neat pile in front of the i
He took the pass box from the 1st Sgt's desk and placed it in his desk which he always kept locked. Then he called the Criminal Investigation Division.
The CID officer who came was a heavy Negro captain in a baggy suit and 1930s snap-brim hat which shouted "Copper!" He nodded his head when Lt. Dottlinger explained the situation and showed him the evidence, but said nothing. The CID man dusted part of one case of bottles at Lt. Dottlinger's insistence. There were over two hundred partial, smudged and clear prints on them. When Lt. Dottlinger demanded that he run a check on the prints, the CID officer shook his head and said, "Lieutenant, they are Coke bottles. For treason, perhaps even for a murder, I might be able to run the ten thousand or so prints on those bottles, but for Coke bottles… sorry about that." He shrugged and left. Tetrick heard Lt. Dottlinger mumble, "Damned nigger cops. Can't expect them to understand the value of property."
Shortly before noon a notice was posted on the bulletin board. There would be no passes pending confession of the bottle-breaker.
In theory mass punishment is against the Uniform Code of Military Justice but since a pass is a privilege rather than a right, it can be denied at any time for no reason.
Most of the men were extremely a
So they did these things for one, two, then three weeks, but no one ever came forward. I noticed that Morning who had been the loudest and longest griper at first seemed to be resigned to the lack of Town. By the end of the fourth week the only hope was the return of Capt. Saunders. Tetrick had given up trying to persuade Lt. Dottlinger, and had taken to playing golf three afternoons a week, drunk before the tenth tee. The men were quiet, but uneasily so. They, like Morning, had stopped talking about it. They gathered shamelessly around the older dependent girls at the pool; they who had vowed to a man at one drunken time or another never to sully their hands on a leech. Even Novotny shouted from the high diving board, strutted his brown body before them and let them pity his scarred leg. He had taken an eighteen-year-old one to the movie one night, but Trick Two was waiting in ambush and hooted him out of the theater. "There are some things a man just doesn't do," Cagle snorted when Novotny complained to him.
Every room had its personal copies of Playboy, and they were closely guarded. Closed doors were respected with a warning knock, and men took alternate cubicles in the latrine out of deference to the Playboy readers. All the seed which heretofore had been cast into the bellies of whores, now flushed down larger, wetter holes, until it was a wonder that the sewage system didn't clog or give birth.