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"What's wrong?" he asked. I don't believe I'd ever seen him concerned about me before.
"Lay twenty on me till payday," I said, and without a word he handed me two tens.
The Trick carried me back from Town that night. The next noon I took the seven hundred out of the bank.
Morning and I moved into the black market in high style, capital behind us, untold riches ahead. We bought cigarettes in the barracks for seven pesos a carton from the troops, made a run each break to Manila, carrying the cartons in the back of an AP's 1948 Dodge, and sold the cartons of Chesterfields and Salems for eleven pesos. One hundred cartons, four hundred pesos, between $135 and $150 U.S. depending on how you changed it. We also carried twenty new stereo albums, which paid well too. We had several people on our payroll, buyers in other outfits, two APs, a Manila drop man, but we still cleared about one hundred dollars a break. I usually spent my fifty in Manila, as did Morning, but the seven hundred stayed in reserve. Ah, we lived well… but it didn't help a thing.
Krummel, fatter, meaner, more sullen each week. Morning, more anxious for violence, for change, for something. The Army, far from being the peaceful sanctuary I had sought, had become more complicated than civilian life. Black markets and beer, and love once again, of a sort, and the Vietnam rumors flying again. I began to hope, then chided myself for being a dumb drunken lifer just waiting for a war, but still I hoped.
One Break after a set of mids, Morning and I were half asleep after the beers we'd had on the drive down. It wasn't quite noon, but it was hot as hell outside the hotel. I was waiting for him to go make the drop, deliver the two large suitcases sitting between the twin beds.
"You going to make the drop, Joe?" I asked, feeling like a bad movie gangster.
"You do it, man. It's too hot outside," he answered. We had been through this scene the last trip. I didn't know what was bugging him, and he wouldn't tell me.
"I don't know where to go. You know that," I said, my eyes closed in the cool conditioned air.
"Yeah, I know," he mumbled. "I'll tell you."
"That's your part of the deal," I said. "Remember."
"Well, why the fuck don't you do something, you fat lazy bastard," he said, only half in jest. "Swill beer like a pig all day."
I opened my eyes. He had sat up and now faced the windows, his sweat-stained back toward me. "What's up?"
"I'm just tired of doing all the work. Taking all the risks."
"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 wi
"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 co
"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 go