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"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 co
"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 begi
"Maybe I'll just walk in and kick Dottlinger's head in."
"Don't make troubles for me. I don't need them. Sgt. Reid didn't show up for work again this morning. Twice this week already. Once more and I'll have the Operations officers down here bitching at me again."
"I can't let it sit. I've got to do something. It's all wrong."
"Now you're talking like him. Leave it alone. Don't make waves for yourself. He's not worth it."
"Maybe not."
"What?"
"Nothing. Nothing. See you."
I left with, as the saying goes, a germ of an idea, though it turned out to be a disease, a plague on both our houses.
It cost me thirty dollars (because I didn't have ten cartons of Salems, fastest moving menthol cigarette on the black market) and a whole tired afternoon listening to Dominic stomp his peg leg against the Plaza bar to make points about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. He told a fair account of the coming of the revolution to his small town: guardia civil executed kneeling against a wall, Fascists clubbed and beaten over a cliff by a mob of drunks, a priest reaped with sickles. But I'd heard it before. I paid the price and in return received a solemn beery pledge from Dominic, on his honor and faith as a stout member of the revolution, on the soul of his leg buried in a nameless Spanish grave, that he would take prompt, decisive action, and send the evidence by way of my houseboy.
I heard nothing for a week. Morning stayed away from me, and when work forced us together, he avoided talk, feeling, I assume, that he had talked too much already. He was odd that way. He had a compulsive need to confess, and often expounded on the need for complete honesty in human relations, love, friendship, etc., but after the kind of confidence which he claimed drew people closer, he always drew away again. But finally the manila envelope appeared crinkling under my pillow, and I quickly spilled the 8x10s on my bunk, half in fear, half in excitement.
There they were: Sgt. Reid and his ski
The three other pictures exhibited a bit more diligence and imagination on Dominic's part. It made me sick. Dottlinger and Reid's wife were chemically locked in that most compromising of love's positions, known in the idiom as 69. I'd seen blue movies, stag films, before, but always drunk, and now I knew why. Love is private, and whatever its motives or methods, it deserves that privacy. The thought of how confused and dazed Reid must have been, caught in his own bed by blackmailers, was bad enough, but Dottlinger's exposure somehow touched a more tender wound. I marveled that he had both the imagination and guts to love a woman that way (for it does take imagination and guts for a Southern boy: the term "cock-sucker," certainly a vile implication across America, in the South refers not to fellatio, but cu